White Camel

davblog: Been Away

2010-09-02T17:46:26+00:00

It's over a month since I've posted anything here. Sorry about that. For the first half of August I was in Italy. The first week, I was speaking at a conference in Pisa and after that we spent a few days in Rome and Venice. I took more than a few photos and they're slowly making their way onto my Flickr page. They should all be up there in a week or so (although, having said that, I still haven't sorted out the photos from last year's holiday in the Baltic).

Rather pleased with the way this photo of the Colosseum came out. But given a half-decent camera, an ancient monument and the Italian flair for lighting there probably wasn't much that could go wrong.

Not quite sure what happened to the rest of August though...

perl hacks: Net::Songkick

2010-08-26T05:07:34+00:00

Sometimes it's good to just take a new idea and hack on it for a couple of hours to see what happens. That's what I've done this evening.

I've been using Songkick for a while. Songkick is a web site that tracks users' attendance at gigs. I've been tracking the gigs I've been going to as well as trying to fill in over thirty years of old gigs.

I've known for some time that Songkick has an API, but until yesterday the API has been for invited partners only. But yesterday on Get Satisfaction they announced that it was now public.

The public API doesn't do that much yet. There are only four documented calls. But it's already useful and I'm sure it will gain more functionality quickly.

And this evening I've spent some time writing a very simple Net::Songkick module. This is really just a proof of concept, but I've got big plans for improving it. And I can already write a useful program like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use XML::LibXML;
use Net::Songkick;

my $user = shift || 'davorg';
my $sk = Net::Songkick->new({
  api_key => $ENV{SONGKICK_API_KEY}
});

my $xml = $sk->get_upcoming_events({
  user => $user,
});

my $xp = XML::LibXML->new->parse_string($xml);

foreach ($xp->findnodes('//event/@displayName')) {
  print $_->to_literal, "\n";
}

If you have any interest in gigs then I highly recommend Songkick to you. And if you like attending gigs and hacking Perl (although not necessarily at the same time) then why not give Net::Songkick a try. All you'll need is an API key from Songkick.

There's a Github repository too; if you feel like hacking on it...

perl hacks: Learning About Traits

2010-08-23T08:41:53+00:00

I've been teaching basic Moose in my training courses for several years now. And, as I've mentioned before, I've been slowly converting some of my CPAN modules to use Moose. But there are still bits of Moose that I haven't really needed to get to grips with.

One such area is Moose's support for Traits. Oh, I knew vaguely what they were and I understood why you might use them. But I'd never implemented a system using traits, so my knowledge about how you'd actually use them was a bit shaky to say the least.

But over the last few days I've learned quite a lot about how to use traits. And I've had to learn it pretty quickly.

It all started a few weeks ago when I got a github pull request from Oliver Charles. Oliver had taken a fork of my Perlanet repository and had massively refactored the codebase so that all the clever bits were implemented as traits.

What this means is that the core Perlanet code is pretty dumb. In order to do anything really useful with it to need to add in some traits. There are traits to read the configuration from a YAML file, traits to carry out various kinds of cleaning of the input and a trait to produce the output using the Template Toolkit. There are also traits to handle caching and OPML generation. All in all it makes the code far nicer to work on.

Oh, and there's a Perlanet::Simple module which uses all of the traits required to implement the Perlanet behaviour that users currently expect.

There were a few problems with Oliver's initial version. Some of the dependencies weren't quite right. But we soon fixed that and last week I finally released Perlanet 0.47 which implemented these changes.

Then I installed it on the server which hosts most of my planets. And everything broke.

So I've spent a lot of the weekend fixing these issues. Part of it was that Oliver's changes assumed some configuration file changes that I hadn't implemented. I changed his changes so that they worked with the existing configuration settings (we don't want users having to change configuration files unnecessarily). Other changes were harder to track down. I particularly enjoyed one where no feeds were fetched unless the user turned on OPML support. I learned a lot about how traits worked by tracking that one down.

But it all seems to be fixed now. Perlanet version 0.51 is available on CPAN and it will hopefully be a lot easier to customise to your needs. I hope we'll see a number of other Perlanet traits appearing over the next few months.

And, most importantly, I've learnt a lot about traits. I think I understand them now.

If you want to learn traits, I can highly recommend asking someone to implement traits in one of your projects. And it's even better if they do it in a slightly broken way so that you need to debug it.

Fundamentals of Perl training in October, 2010, in Ramat Gan

2010-08-22T20:13:51+00:00

After a long period that I was giving only on-site classes finally I decided that it might be time to start offering the "public registration" classes as well.

It is a lot more work to organize such class as I need to be in touch with several customers and there were cases when people cancelled their participation in the last minute but recently several companies indicated that they would like to send 1-2 people to such class so I hope it won't be that hard

The syllabus of the Fundamentals of Perl training is on the web site of PTI but actually the whole material can be found on my web site.

Fifteen ways to kill your job interview

2010-08-16T00:35:13+00:00

There are hundreds of ways to ruin an interview, but here are 15 that are dear to me, or that candidates have pulled on me in the past.

Show up late
- It's inexcusable. Drive there the day before to make sure you know you can get there in time.
Be unprepared
- Your first assignment at this company is to show up prepared. Don't fail it.
Smoke, or smell like smoke
Have bad breath or body odor
- Nobody wants to smell your smells. Eradicate them.
Shake hands like a fish
- Don't shake hands with a death grip, but don't wuss out, either.
Come underdressed
- If you find yourself asking "Do I have to do X?" for the interview, play it safe and do it. That means wear a suit.
Speak ill of anyone, especially past employers
- If you complain at the interview, you'll complain all day at work, too. No boss wants to deal with that.
Complain; discuss your problems
- Your boss has his own job-related problems to deal with. He doesn't want to hear about yours.
Bring up your needs, such as money or benefits
- Your interview is all about what you can do for the company, not what they can do for you.
Lie
- You'll be found out, and you'll be worried about it until you are.
Appear uninterested
- No boss wants to hire someone who doesn't care about the job she's going to be doing.
Fail to ask your own questions
- The best way to show that you care, and that you have a mind for business, is to ask your own questions about what you've discussed during the interview.
Appear desparate
- Enthusiasm is one thing. Desperation is another.
Leave your phone on
- There's no way you could be expecting a call that's more important than this interview.
Cut the interview short
- Allocate adequate time for an interview. A longer interview is always better, so plan for the good. Don't try to squeeze in an interview on a long lunch hour. Make sure your kids are adequately covered and you don't have to say "Sorry, I have to leave, my sitter can only keep my kids 'til 4:00."

Perl 6 subroutines and home made operators

2010-08-15T15:10:12+00:00

Welcome back to the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats

This time together with a Perl 6 screencast to show the thought operator and the +- operator of Perl 6. Direct link to the Perl 6 subroutines screencast

This entry was first sent out as part of the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats. Visit here to subscribe.
It was also included the Perl 6 series of screencasts.

The Thought operator

I just tried the thought operator in Perl 6. Typed in this:

  "szabgab" .oO "Perl 6 is cool";

and got the following:

  szabgab thinks Perl 6 is cool

The +- operator

I also tried the +- operator:

  2.78  ~~ 10 +- 3 ?? 't' !! 'f'     # f
  7.5   ~~ 10 +- 3 ?? 't' !! 'f'     # t
  13    ~~ 10 +- 3 ?? 't' !! 'f'     # t
  13.1  ~~ 10 +- 3 ?? 't' !! 'f'     # f

I think you get the point here. We check if the value on the left is between 10 +- 3.

~~ is the smart match operator, ?? !! are the two parts of the ternary operator of Perl 6 and +- is, well not everyone has the +- or the thought operator but if you read on you'll see how you can create one for yourself.

Subroutines in Perl 6

Subroutines in Perl 6 are declared using the sub keyword just as in Perl 5 But in Perl 6, after the name of the subroutine one can provide a signature, describing the parameters that function accepts.

    use v6;

    sub f($a, $b) {
        return "$a - $b";
    }

    say f(4, 2);

If called with a different number of arguments then Perl will issue an error message:

    say f(4, 2, 5);

gives this message:

    Too many positional parameters passed; got 3 but expected 2
      in 'f' at line 3:script.p6
      in main program body at line 8:script.p6

    say f(4);

gives this message:

    Not enough positional parameters passed; got 1 but expected 2
      in 'f' at line 3:script.p6
      in main program body at line 8:script.p6

Perl 5 style in Perl 6

For people who really want the Perl 5 style subroutine declaration they can use this code:

    use v6;
    
    sub f {
        return @_.perl
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);     # [4, 2]
    say f(4);        # [4]
    say f(4, 2, 3);  # [4, 2, 3]

but that would eliminate all the nice features of Perl 6.

Optional parameter

What if we would like to allow the user to pass 1 or 2 parameters? For that case we can mark the second parameter as optional:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, $b?) {
        return defined $b ?? "$a - $b" !! "$a - na";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);    # 4 - 2
    say f(4);       # 4 - na

The ?? !! is a the ternary operator of Perl 6 so what we see above is that if $b is defined the "$a - $b" is returned and when $b is not defined then 'na' will be returned instead of that value.

Parameters are read-only

In other cases you might be tempted to replace $b with some default value like this:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, $b?) {
        $b //= 17;
        return defined $b ?? "$a - $b" !! "$a - na";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);    # 4 - 2
    say f(4);       # 4 - na

but this will throw an exception like this:

    Cannot modify readonly value
      in '&infix:<=>' at line 1
      in 'f' at line 4:02.p6
      in main program body at line 8:02.p6

as arguments in Perl 6 are by default read only;

Default value of a parameter

There are two solutions to this, depending on what do you really want to achieve: If you only want to give a default value to $b then the best way is to add it right in the signature:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, $b = 17) {
        return defined $b ?? "$a - $b" !! "$a - na";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);    # 4 - 2
    say f(4);       # 4 - 17

In this case you don't even need the question mark '?' as the presence of a default value automatically makes the parameter optional. This still keeps $b read-only within the subroutine.

Making the parameter a copy and thus changeable

The other solution is to mark the $b variable as a 'copy' of the original value. Therefore allowing the user to make changes to it:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, $b? is copy) {
        $b //= 17;
        return defined $b ?? "$a - $b" !! "$a - na";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);    # 4 - 2
    say f(4);       # 4 - 17

Type restrictions on parameters

We can also restrict the parameters of a subroutine to certain data types:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, Int $b) {
        return "$a - $b";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);
    say f(4, "foo");

The first call will succeed but the second will generate an exception:

    4 - 2
    Nominal type check failed for parameter '$b'; expected Int but got Str instead
      in 'f' at line 4:03.p6
      in main program body at line 9:03.p6

Other constraints on parameters

It is also possible to provide further constraints on the parameters:

    use v6;
    
    sub f($a, Int $b where { $b < 10 }) {
        return "$a - $b";
    }
    
    say f(4, 2);
    say f(4, 11);

    4 - 2
    Constraint type check failed for parameter '$b'
      in 'f' at line 4:03.p6
      in main program body at line 9:03.p6

Creating operators in Perl 6

There are of course a lot of other aspects for subroutine definition in Perl 6 but let's now go back to our original goal, to create the +- operator.

So how can one create a new operator in Perl 6? It is quite simple as an operator is just a subroutine with a funny way of calling it.

So here is how to create the thought operator. We create a subroutine, declaring it to be an infix operator with the name .oO

    sub infix:<.oO>($name, $thought) {  
        say "$name thinks $thought"
    }

Specifically we want to make +- an infix operator that create a Range. Not something complex. Within the angle brackets we put the new operator, the sub has a signature of two scalars and within the block we put actual code that needs to be executed.

    sub infix:<+->($a, $b) { ($a-$b) .. ($a+$b) }

Then we can use

   5 +- 2

that will create the range 5-2 .. 5+2 also known as 3 .. 7

Comments and Discussion

I am always open to comments and criticism (just have a positive spin to it :-) So if you find any issue with the examples, please don't hesitate to let me know.

If you'd like to ask question about Perl 6, probably the best would be to sign up on the Perl 6 users list by sending an e-mail to

    perl6-users-subscribe@perl.org

The archive of the perl6-users list is at: Perl6.org

The even better way is to join the #perl6 IRC channel on irc.freenode.net If you have not used IRC yet, the easies way is to use the web based IRC client of Freenode

Previous issues of this newsletter can be found at Perl 6 Tricks and Treats.

DBIx::Class join, prefetch

2010-08-13T13:34:25+00:00

Over the last 15 years I've joined two database tables into a one-to-many relationship about a billion times. But I've never had any software let me loop the left table and right tables separately before. Turns out this magic has been in DBIx::Class for several years.

Runnable demo.

When table 'foo' is in a one-to-many relationship with table 'bar', you can:


my $foo_rs = $schema->resultset('Foo')->search(
   {},
   {
      join     => 'bars',
      prefetch => 'bars',
      order_by => 'me.id',
   }
);

while (my $foo = $foo_rs->next) {
   printf "%s\n", $foo->id;
   if (my $bar_rs = $foo->bars) {
      while (my $bar = $bar_rs->next) {
         printf "   %s\n", $bar->desc;
      }
   }
}

Output:


1
2
   aaa
   bbb
   ccc
3

Still one SQL statement against the database (fast!). Much prettier than ugly manual de-duping of redundant columns.

More Perl events in 2010

2010-08-12T01:21:45+00:00

Yesterday I wrote about tech events with some Perl content Perl::Staff - Upcoming events for promoting Perl. This time let me list the upcoming Perl events:

The Pittsburgh Perl Workshop 2010 will take place between 9-10 October in, well, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

OSDC.fr is not strictly a Perl event but AFAIK it is organized by the French Perl Mongueurs. It will be on the same dates 9-10 October, in Paris, France.

YAPC::Asia October 14-16 in Tokyo, Japan.

The Austrian Perl Workshop will take place later this year in Vienna, Austria. (no fixed date yet).

OSDC Australia will take place betwee 24-26 November, 2010 in Melbourne.

The Russian Perl Workshop between December 18, 2010 in Saint Petersburg, Russia

The London Perl Workshop usually takes place in December. No website yet.

That's it for 2010 as far as I know.

Perl::Staff - Upcoming events for promoting Perl

2010-08-10T19:56:52+00:00

As I mentioned during my lightning talk in Pisa there are a number of tech events in Europe where it would be interesting to have Perl presence. The full list of events that I am aware of can be found on the events wiki page and the Perl presence is being organized for some of them already.

If you have time it would be nice to help out the organizers or if you can attend other events, then to organize something there or if you know about more events, please add them to the wiki.

Here is what is planned so far:

Froscon in St Augustin, Germany will take place 21-22 August 2010. Organized by Renée Bäcker there is going to be a full track of Perl talks.

FrosCamp in Zurich, Switzerland will be 17-18 September 2010. Oranized by Renée Bäcker, as I can see there is going to be a Perl booth and maybe a couple of Perl related talks. The dead-line for talk submission is 2010-08-14. Just a few days from now.

OSWC in Malaga, Spain between 27-28 October 2010. The organizers, Salvador Fandiño, Diego Kuperman, JJ Merelo, Rodrigo de Oliveira are planning to have a Perl track.

Brandenburger Linux-Infotag in Potsdam, Germany on 6 Nov 2010. Organized by Renée Bäcker they are stll looking for more people to help out at the Perl booth and give Perl related talks.

T-Dose in Eindhoven, Holland will be between 6-7 November 2010. I've just started to organize the Perl presence there. Let me know if you can help out.

YAPC::EU 2010 Pisa

2010-08-09T09:54:38+00:00

I really enjoyed myself in Pisa. Thanks for all the organizers of YAPC::EU and the speakers and all the attendees. The event was really awesome!

After spending most of my time at YAPC::NA in the hallway track trying to talk about my grant proposal and after being discouraged by some of the negative comments there I decided to try to spend a lot more time in talks and not to initiate discussion about it. Still many people stopped me in breaks and asked me about my grant. I tried to give them a status report and in most cases they tried to encourage me to keep going with it.

I also talked to Allison Randal about the grant and as far as I understand she said the TPF will never approve my grant. She did not say what is her opinion and if she would vote for it, but she was one of the people who told me a few month ago that instead of trying to setup a separate organization for this I should do it within The Perl Foundation.

Actually I think she said that the only thing that can bring Perl back to its fame is a company doing a very interesting and high-profile project in it. Similar to how the work of 37 Signals releasing Rails made Ruby interesting.

Allison also said that instead of asking for a grant I should just organize more events and try to raise money for them from companies. I just wonder, if I take all the risk then why should that be within TPF?

After her advantures in getting to YAPC, finally Karen Pauley and me also had some time to discuss the grant. I think this was very important thought I am not sure we have managed to move forward. At least now I understand much better the varous things she needs to ballance as the president of TPF. Frankly, I don't think many people would be able to do that and I am quite afraid that she will burn out and then the TPF will stop making any progress.

I won't list here all the other nice people I met at YAPC as that would take ages but I'd like to say again thanks to the organizers and all the people who participated!

Some pictures of YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa.

perl hacks: Perl Vogue

2010-08-05T08:18:51+00:00

I'm at YAPC::EU in Pisa, so I'm too busy having fun to write a long blog post about my new project - Perl Vogue. But I thought you might be interested in the lightning talk that I used to announce it yesterday.

Perl Vogue

View more presentations from Dave Cross.

More detail when I get back from Italy in ten days.

Perl 6 screencast - part 5 - hashes

2010-07-31T14:49:30+00:00

Direct link to the Perl 6 screencast about hashes

See more Perl 6 entries.

Perl 6 Code examples

Hashes in Perl 6 are denoted using % sign: Creating a hash

  my %h = "Foo" => 1, "Bar" => 2;

printing it out for debugging purposes:

  say %h.perl;    # {"Foo" => 1, "Bar" => 2}

printing the value of a single key:

  say %h{"Foo"};  # 1

The quotation marks are required around the string:

  say %h{Foo};    # Could not find sub &Foo

You can use variables without quoting them:

  my $name = "Foo";
  say %h{$name};   # 1

Recall from the previus section that you can use the angle brackets to quote a number of strings and create a list of them:

  say <Foo Bar>;   # FooBar

This notation can be used to eliminate the need for quotation marks:

  say %h<Foo>;     # 1

You can actually use multiple keys there fetching a list of values of a hash slice:

  say %h<Foo Bar>;  # 1 2

Using the "perl" method just further proves that you get back a list of values

  say %h<Foo Bar>.perl;  # (1, 2)

In order to fetch all the keys you can use the ".keys" method and then you can iterate over the individual keys and fetch the respective values:

  for %h.keys -> $k { say "$k %h{$k}"; }

There is also a ".values" method that will return the list of values. Even though in our case the values are unique in the general case you cannot easily get back the keys from the values:

  for %h.values -> $v { say $v; }

In case you prefere to iterate over the key-value pairs for that you can use the ".kv" method:

  for %h.kv -> $k, $v { say "$k - $v"; }

To add another key with its value you can use the following code:

  %h<Moo> = 3;

  say %h.perl;    # {"Moo" => 3, "Foo" => 1, "Bar" => 2}

If the key already exists this will replace the value in the hash:

  %h<Moo> = 4;
  say %h.perl;   # {"Moo" => 4, "Foo" => 1, "Bar" => 2}

On the other hand in Perl 6 you can also use the ".push" method on a hash that will add the value to the given key creating an array as the value of that key:

  %h.push( 'Moo' => 5 );
  say %h.perl;   # {"Moo" => [4, 5], "Foo" => 1, "Bar" => 2}

davblog: Greens and Science

2010-07-29T20:03:28+00:00

At the time of the European election last year, there was some debate in the blogosphere about the Green Party's attitude to science. Holfordwatch picked up on a report which said that the Greens supported the continued use of "alternative medicine" in the NHS. Rational people, of course, gave up all idea of voting for them.

To their credit, the Greens responded to this by clarifying (and, actually, seeming to completely drop) some of these policies. In this Q&A in the Guardian, their press officer, Scott Redding, was asked:

If the balance of evidence suggests that a treatment does not perform any better than placebo, should it be supported by the NHS?

He replied:

The short answer is No. Our policy is that any medicine or treatment available on the NHS should be backed up by scientific evidence. Some new treatments, and some currently available on the NHS, will pass this test, others will not.

Of course, you might well think that it doesn't matter what the Green Party thinks on this as they'll never have the power to enact their policies. And you'd be right to think that.

But they do have an MP now. Caroline Lucas is the MP for Brighton Pavilion. And whilst she's not exactly driving government policy, she does have the same ways to make her views known as all other MPs, including signing Early Day Motions.

So, given the clear direction indicated by Scott Redding, it's disappointing to see the she has signed one of David Tredinnick's nonsense EDMs on homeopathy (as discussed previously on this blog).

On one hand, the Greens clearly say that they won't support medical treatments without scientific evidence to support them. And then their first ever MP goes and gives her support to something that is on a the same level as witchcraft. If I was one of the enlightened people who voted for her back in May, I'd be feeling pretty pissed off about now.

I had hoped that, at least, the Green Party would prove themselves to be above the lies and spin that characterise so much of British politics. I'm really disappointed to see those hopes dashed.

Update: Lucas has received a lot of comment over this on Twitter in the last few hours. She has posted what I can only assume is supposed to be an explanation for her actions:

EDM is about lack of BMA's consultation & argues that local NHS better placed to know patient needs, based on objective clinical assessment

It's nonsense of course. Tredinnick is a well-known parliamentary advocate for homeopathy. His EDM is purely about supporting the provision of quackery on the NHS. Tredinnick is deliberately inventing scientific controversy where none exists. The science is settled. Homeopathy does not work.

If patients have been told that homeopathy is worth investigating, then their doctors should make it clear to them that they have been misled. Doctors should not be encouraging this delusion.

davblog: Government Ignores Science

2010-07-26T14:24:13+00:00

Section 47 of the Government Response to the Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on homeopathy:

We note the Committee’s view that allowing for the provision of homeopathy may risk seeming to endorse it, and we will keep the position under review. However, we do not believe that this risk amounts to a risk to patient trust, choice or safety, nor do we believe that the risk is significant enough for the Department to take the unusual step of removing PCTs’ flexibility to make their own decisions. We believe that providing appropriate information for commissioners, clinicians and the public, and ensuring a strong ethical code for clinicians, remain the most effective ways to ensure quality outcomes, patient satisfaction and the appropriate use of NHS funding.

So basically no change. Our new government is just as capable of ignoring scientific evidence as the old one. And the NHS will continue to squander millions on sugar pills.

I expect I'll come back and fill this in with some more detail when I've calmed down a little.

Happy 2nd birthday to Padre - Get on an IRC channel

2010-07-24T15:55:45+00:00

The IRC redirector on the Padre website. Type in some username and select the channel.

If your perl related channel is missing from the list let us know on #padre irc.perl.org

I hope you'll come by the Padre channel and say happy birthday to the developers!

Direct link to the screencast

How to connect to the #perl6 IRC channel and try Perl 6 on-line

2010-07-23T17:45:44+00:00

Direct link to the screencast

See more Perl 6 entries.

web interface to Freenode. Pick some username and type in the name of the channel: #perl6

Perl 6 screencast - part 4 - files

2010-07-23T02:05:45+00:00

Direct link to the Perl 6 files screencast

See more Perl 6 entries.

Perl 6 Code examples

Reading in all the lines of a file in a single scalar using the slurp function:

  use v6;

  my $content = slurp "text.txt";
  say $content.chars;

Reading in all the lines of a file into the first element of an array using the slurp:

  use v6;

  my @content = slurp "text.txt";
  say @content.elems;
  say @content[0].chars;

Reading in all the lines, each line in a separate element of the array using the lines function:

  use v6;

  my @content = lines "text.txt";
  say @content.elems;
  say @content[0].chars;

Iterating over the lines one by one. lines is evaluated lazily here:

  use v6;

  for lines "text.txt" -> $line {
    say $line.chars;
  }

Opening a file using the open function. Reading in one line using the get method. Iterating over the rest of the file using the lines method:

  use v6;
  my $fh = open "text.txt";

  my $first_line = $fh.get;
  say $first_line;

  for $fh.lines -> $line {
    say $line.chars;
  }

Opening a file for writing, printing a string to it using the say method and then closeing it to flush all the buffered output. Then re-reading the file just to show what happened.

  use v6;

  my $fh = open "out.txt", :w;
  $fh.say("text 4");
  $fh.close;

  say slurp "out.txt";

Perl 6 screencast - part 3 - arrays and ranges

2010-07-22T11:38:18+00:00

Direct link to the Perl 6 arrays and ranges screencast

See more Perl 6 entries.

Perl 6 Code examples

  use v6;
  my @people = ;
  for @people -> $n {
    say $n;
  }


  use v6;
  my @people = ;
  for 0 .. @people.elems/2 -> $i {
    say "@people[$i*2] -  @people[$i*2+1]";
  }


  use v6;
  my @people = ;
  for @people -> $name, $phone {
    say "$name - $phone";
  }


  use v6;
  my @names = ;
  my @phones = 123 456 789 512>;
  for @names Z @phones -> $name, $phone {
    say "$name - $phone";
  }


  use v6;
  for 1 .. 10 -> $n {
    say $n;
  }


  use v6;
  for 1,3 ... Inf -> $n {
    say $n;
    last if $n > 10;
  }

Call for Perl Development grant proposals

2010-07-21T14:49:42+00:00

Alberto has recently published the offical 2010Q3 Call for Grant Proposals of The Perl Foundation. I'd like to encourage everyone to submit proposals. The dead-line is within 10 days.

The standard TPF development grants are limited up to 3,000 USD/grant. I don't know the exact reason for that limitation but I am quite sure part of the reason is that TPF does not have a lot of money.

While this amount of money might not be a big motivation for someone who lives in the wealthier areas of Europe or North America but as Dave Rolsky and a number of others have pointed out getting the grant might have other positive effects.

On the other hand people living in countries where the salaries are much lower (e.g. India, China, Africa and even South America) could use such a grant and fill a full salary for 2-3 months or even longer. They could implement much bigger projects during that time period.

Let's see that there are lots of good proposals!

On tour: Open Source Bridge, YAPC::NA and other fun things

2010-07-21T01:30:30+00:00

After the fun I had at OSCON last year, it was no effort at all for pjf to convince me to spend June and July in the USA this year, conferencing.

Portland, Oregon

I arrived at midnight on the 31st May and was met at the airport by Schwern, pjf and Nadia, who took me onwards to donuts and pies. Having traveled for something like 30 hours at the time I was rather wiped out and probably not as appreciative of this as I should have been, but I soon got to bed and slept very soundly.

Schwern warned me ahead of time that he was going to be a busy, and thus less friendly host, and that he and his housemate Nick had been a little guested-out due to an almost endless procession of house-guests. He must have exaggerated. Between them, Schwern and Nick took us to the local farmers' market, to a parade, to numerous dinners and drinks out, and more. Schwern helped us get to the conference location, and also accompanied me home most nights.

Open Source Bridge

The conference was Open Source Bridge; and it is unlike any community-run conference I've ever attended. It was extremely professionally run, with copious amounts of information, high quality keynotes and speakers, an excellent feedback system... big and little things that the conferences I've been involved with are still struggling with after 6+ years and this was only OSB's second year! My talk was very well received, I was spoiled for choice for every single session and the unconference at the end really just capped things off. It was good to see so many familiar faces, and I caught up with some Australians, and Australian-expats that I hadn't seen for quite some time.

If you get to choose the geek conference you go to next year; make it Open Source Bridge!

More Portland, Oregon

The following two weeks, Sherri and Christie kindly hosted Paul and I. When I ran into some personal issues, I could not have hoped for more generous hosts. Sherri made sure I got out of bed each day, and many days Schwern and others made sure I got out of the house. Apparently we were lovely guests, but really Sherri and Christie were excellent hosts. Sherri cooked copious amounts of extremely yummy vegan food, and let me eat it for breakfast and lunch. They took us strawberry picking, to a great Ethiopian restaurant, and took me to an amazing vegan cafe for breakfast on my last day in Portland.

YAPC::NA, Columbus, Ohio

Next up was YAPC::NA in Columbus, Ohio. Very much like YAPC::EU I felt completely at home in this crowd. It was great to know that I could walk into any conference talk and have a pretty good idea of the topic matter. It did feel a little strange that many of the big names, and the people I view as particularly important knew me, but many of the regular people neither recognised me nor my "handle", but I suspect I shouldn't have been so surprised.

My tutorial was very well received, I met a whole lot more people, learned a bunch of new things, and got all fired up about finishing writing our Enterprise Perl course and documenting perl5i. It was really, really awesome to catch up with Karen, Jesse and Piers again, specifically.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee wasn't originally on my list of places to visit, however a friend online invited me to drop by and visit, and I had a few days free, so why not? My friend, Jordi, and Sarah, invited me to stay with them. Jordi is an astrophysicist who spent some of the first afternoon explaining to me how it is that neutrinos do in fact mutate. Which was actually much more interesting than I think he thought I'd find it.

We walked the riverfront, found great restaurants, saw the music festival from afar, went to a nearby Strawberry festival (yum!) and spent time playing with the newly arrived arduino set. I've been wishing I could get involved with arduino for years, but also never been into electronics. Jordi and I worked through the basic tutorials with his board, and I found the whole thing very cool!

To top the trip off, Jordi and Sarah invited me to hang out for drinks with some of their colleagues one evening (they all work at the nearby university). I had a thoroughly good time, and felt I fitted in just fine, even though most of them use Python. :) After drinks there was dinner (with 3 free drinks for the ladies) and then Tron. Ah, good times.

New York City

My next scheduled stop was the big apple. While at YAPC::NA I discovered that a fellow Melbourne Perl Monger (Patrick) had recently moved to New York, and he insisted that we should stay with him. I had some minor adventures getting to his place, but received a very warm welcome, and was glad to take a cold shower. That was the first summer-like weather I'd seen for my whole trip thus far.

While in New York, I explored the New York Public Library (and saw the Rose Room), had a tour of Google with lunch (thank you to Tom Limoncelli), caught the Staten Island ferry, saw the Statue of Liberty, walked down Wall Street (and saw the cordoned-off outside of the New York Stock Exchange), checked out the Empire State building, the Sex Museum, Times Square and the Rockerfella(?) building. Much touristy stuff.

Patrick and Helen were lovely hosts, and it wasn't their fault at all that the temperature refused to drop to something reasonable for the whole time I was in town. ;)

Minneapolis, Minnesota

My last touring destination was Minneapolis where Steven Levine arranged an amazing weekend of activities to keep me busy. I did my best, but arrived with the start of a sore throat and fever. I arrived on a Thursday afternoon and first up was dinner with Matt and Deb followed by a scotch tasting. Even though I'm not a scotch drinker, I wished I was well enough to participate, but having already had some paracetamol, I dared not. It seemed like a lot of fun though.

On Friday, Steven took me out to a favourite breakfast location (which we did every day, actually), and then later to a wedding of two of his dear friends (Denise and Jim), neither of whom I knew. Both bride and groom sought me out and told me how glad they were that I could come. There was shape-note singing, morris dancing and contra-dancing and a fantastic time was had by all - especially me! I also got to meet more lovely people including a sweet, sweet gentleman by the name of Mal.

On Saturday we drove off to a little township which has a cafe in a cave, explored some antique stores and enjoyed the river before going to the arts museum (very cool) and then saw a documentary about Joan Rivers (fascinating) and finishing with dinner at Pizza Luce's (with a fun story attached).

Sunday was July 4th. So we started the day with a traditional block party at Matt and Deb's with a children's bike parade (or race), more morris dancing, a jazz band, singing and much neighbourly entertainment. I also managed to squeeze in a chance to run off and meet another friend, Yevgeny, for coffee where we talked about scuba diving and the Con I hadn't made time to attend). We ended the day with dinner with Michael and daughters followed by fireworks. By this point I was taking painkillers every 4 hours just to be able to talk, so I was getting a bit worried.

Monday we'd planned to go to the Taste of Minnesota festival, but I asked instead if I could go to a doctor (after talking with my travel insurance people first). The doctor was lovely, ran some tests and advised me to take various over-the-counter drugs. They helped immensely, and made it possible for me to attend the sea shanty singing that evening (although the drugs weren't quite good enough to allow me to sing).

The next day was a day of sad farewells. I felt so welcome and adopted into Steven's crowd that I would have loved to stay in Minneapolis for another month! However, it was time for my next adventure, so Steven drove Mal and I to the airport and he headed off to work. Mal I and had some minor fun getting through security, caught our planes in different directions, and thus far, lived happily ever after.

Two weeks on, and I might be over whatever it was that made me sick, too.

Perl 6 presentation in Ramat Gan on 26th July 2010

2010-07-20T19:43:54+00:00

Next week, on 26th July, I am going to give a Perl 6 presentation at the 17th meeting of PyWeb Israel. That's the monthly meeting of the local Python users group.

There will be a Ruby on Rails presentation before mine and Python + Javascript presentation after it. It's going to be interesting and now I need to invest a lot of time and energy in preparing a new talk that might fit this audience.

In the meantime watch some Perl 6 screencasts I prepared.

Perl 6 screencast - part 2 - arrays

2010-07-20T18:54:38+00:00

Direct link to the Perl 6 arrays screencast

See more Perl 6 entries.

Perl 6 Code examples

  use v6;
  my @names = "Foo", "Bar", "Moo";
  say @names[];
  say "Hello {@names} how are you?";
  say "Hello { join('; ', @names) } how are you?";


  use v6;
  my @names = ;
  say "Hello {@names} how are you?";
  for @names -> $n {
    say $n;
  }

Introduction to Perl 6 screencast - part 1 - scalars

2010-07-19T17:07:33+00:00

Direct link to the Perl 6 scalars screencast

Rakudo

IRC: #perl6 on irc.freenode.net

Perl 6 Code examples

  use v6;
  say "Hello world";


  use v6;
  my $name = prompt "Please type in your name: ";
  say "Hello $name, how are you?";


  use v6;
  my $year = prompt "When were you born? ";
  if $year > 1987 {
    say "You are younger than Perl by { $year - 1987 } years";
  }


  use v6;
  my $year = prompt "When were you born? ";
  if 1995 > $year > 1987 {
    say "You are younger than Perl 1 but older than Perl 5";
  }



  use v6;
  my $luck = prompt "What is your lucky number? ";
  if $luck == 3 or $luck == 7 or $luck == 13 {
    say "Oh, that's like mine";
  }

  if $luck == 3|7|13 {
    say "Oh, that's still like mine";
  }

Start Up Weekend and the technology they need

2010-07-17T22:17:36+00:00

Last week I participated on the Tel Aviv StartUp Weekend. There were about 150 participants who pitched 56 ideas. Then 16 of them got selected. By the end of the 50 hour marathon they each built a prototype and put together a business plan giving a 5 min presentation of their project.

In order to allow observant Jews to participate the event was held during the week and not on Saturday. This might have skewed the people towards those who were so serious that they were ready to take one day off from work in order to participate, or those who are self employed or even unemployed.

The event took place at the Peres Peace House in Jaffa and among the 150 participants there were about 15 Palestinians from east Jerusalem and from Ramallah, which serves as the capital of the Palestinan Authority. This alone made it very interesting and I hope at least some of the mixed teams will keep in contact later on.

The event started by a few talks given by the sponsors and then everyone had the opportunity to give a 90 second pitch about any idea for a start-up. There were 56 pitches. Each one of them was also asked what kind of people they want on their teams. I don't have the exact listing so I am writing this from memory. Most of the people mentioned they need a designer and people who understand business development etc. When talking about developers the mostly requested experinces were these:

Developers

Facebook developer
Drupal and/or PHP
Django and/or Python
Android meaning Java
iPhone meaning Objective C

The technologies that were not mentioned were Ruby, Ruby on Rails and Perl.

I personally tried to join two teams but I did not feel that I have a lot to contribute. At least not in the areas where I claim to be an expert. In the teams where they wanted to build a back-end prototype there were usually at least 2 PHP or Python developers so there was no point in trying to convince them to use Perl. Besides that, I am usually not good at the quick and dirty jobs.

So I spent most of my time walking around trying to see what others are doing and showing an idea I have to some people seeing what do they think. Maybe I can find a few people who might be interested in this project.

Open source vs Start-up

While at the event I was wondering how many of the developers there are involved in the open source world? I met a few people there whom I knew from earlier and they pointed at a few others I did not know who are involved in open source projects. Some of them attending meetings as well some of them "just" coding. None of them were Perl developers.

Which brought me to the other question, why are there so few start-ups using Perl?. Frankly I don't have a proof that this is indeed the case but it certainly seems so. I belive most of the start-ups pick the languages based on what do the the entrepreneurs know.

Are the Perl developers less of an entrepreneur-type than those using Python or PHP?

Are the Python and PHP communities more forgiving (or even welcoming) to people who are self-employed or even entrepreneur wanting to build a large business?

davblog: Petition Closed Prematurely

2010-07-16T09:33:42+00:00

Earlier this year, I created a petition on the (then) government's petition web site. The petition called for the government to fully implement the recommendations of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy - basically calling on the government to stop wasting money on homeopathy.

The petition was due to be open for signatures for a year. In retrospect, that was probably a mistake as no matter who was in government, they would have made up their mind about the issue long before the petition closed.

But since the general election everything has changed. All of the petitions were closed to new signatures during the election campaign and they didn't re-open once the new government was in place. Instead the web site explained that the new government was considering the best way to proceed with the site. The front page of the site now says:

With a new Government in place a review is taking place of online services, including e-petitions. We are committed to improving the e-petitions process and are looking at ways of ensuring that it functions as part of a cohesive approach to public debate and transparent government. A full announcement on how we plan to use these and other services across Government will be made as soon as this important work is completed.

It goes on to say:

Existing e-petitions, submitted to the previous administration, will not be carried forward to the new administration as part of this process. E-petitions that were live at the time of the election announcement on 6 April, when the e-petitions system was suspended, will therefore not be reopened for signatures. We are issuing responses to petitions that had exceeded the 500 signatures threshold as of 6 April 2010 and these can be viewed on the HMG e-petitions responses page.

So my petition has been closed. In the three or four months that it was open, over 1,600 people signed it. That means that we can expect some kind of response from the government, although it's not there yet and there's no indication of when we will receive it.

Thanks to everyone who signed the petition. Perhaps in this new cuts-driven regime removing finding for magic water on the NHS is an obvious way to save a few million quid.

davblog: Polite Discourse

2010-07-08T19:52:41+00:00

So today was the day that I was called a "sack of shit" by one of the UK's most popular political bloggers.

It was all pretty silly really. I didn't even really disagree with what he had written. I just pointed out that his blog entry had two completely unattributed quotations.

It's Iain's blog, of course, so it's completely up to him whether or not he wants to publish unattributed quotations. My point was that not to do so might lead people to wonder where they came from. It's so easy to link to sources on the web that if you don't you run the risk of arousing suspicion.

I found a reference for one of the quotes (it was a parliamentary Early Day Motion - they aren't hard to find), but Google came up blank for the other. I had assumed that it came from a blog post, but that no longer looked likely. I asked Iain if he had made it up. I didn't believe for a second that he had invented it (although, of course, he has previous in this area), I was just demonstrating the conclusions that it was possible to reach from the information he had made available.

And that's when he might have overreacted just a touch in his reply. A suspicious person might wonder why that touched such a nerve, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt (I'm sure he'd do the same for me). I pointed to his reply on Twitter and he responded:

@davorg Next time don't make groundless allegations. if you can't stand the heat, and all that...

I made no allegation, let alone a groundless one.

Bizarrely, even though he took such obvious umbrage at my question, he followed my advice and edited his blog post so that it included a link to the EDM. He also stated in his reply that the other quotation came from a private email. So I got all the answers I wanted. Which was nice.

When you're blogging you can choose the amount of reference material that you show to your readers. I like to link to any articles that I'm quoting and generally throw in as many links as possible to my sources so that my readers can make up their own minds about my interpretations of what I'm writing about. Other people deal in scurrilous rumour or unsubstantiated gossip. You wouldn't expect them to link to their sources. That's their choice. It's their blog. They can follow their own rules. Whatever makes them comfortable.

In my opinion, showing your sources is treating your readers as adults. It's trusting them to draw their conclusions about what you're writing. It's showing your working for extra credit. Giving your readers no information about your sources is treating them like idiots. It's a tabloid style of blogging and whenever I come across that style of blogging it makes me wonder what they are hiding.

In my mind, showing your sources equates to quality blogging. Not doing so is suspect.

I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I do, however, expect to be able to make these suggestions on one of the UK's most read political blogs without the blog author calling me a sack of shit.

That's just rude.

Perl 6 and Perl 5 training classes around YAPC::EU in Pisa

2010-07-08T17:40:18+00:00

Just a reminder that there are going to be a number of training courses on the days before and after YAPC::EU. (2,3 and 7 August).

The detailed list can be found on the web site of YAPC::Europe as linked above.

Trainers include Dave Cross, Dave Rolsky, Matt S. Trout , Herbert Breunung, brian d foy and myself. In order of apperance. Prices range between 150-220 Euro which are way lower than the prices these people normally charge when they do corporate training. It's a bargain.

Rakudo * and Perl 6

My main interest is of course the Perl 6 training I am going to teach. I want to making sure it gives something that is really interesting and worth the money.

The timing is good as Rakudo * (a "usable Perl 6") will be relased on July 29, just a few days before YAPC::EU.

There are going to be several Perl 6 related talks in the regular schedule:

I'll try to make sure that on one hand people who attended these talk will not get the same material twice on the other hand those who don't attend the Perl 6 related talks will not miss anything. It will be an interesting exercise.

I am also happy that Patrick Michaud, the pumking and lead developer of Rakodo will also be in the class. As in previous ocassions in Oslo and Lisbon I am sure it will be fun.

If you are interested please register now.

Perl 6 and Perl 5 training classes around YAPC::EU in Pisa

2010-07-08T17:40:18+00:00

Just a reminder that there are going to be a number of training courses on the days before and after YAPC::EU. (2,3 and 7 August).

The detailed list can be found on the web site of YAPC::Europe as linked above.

Rakudo * and Perl 6

My main interest is of course the Perl 6 training I am going to teach. I want to making sure it gives something that is really interesting and worth the money.

The timing is good as Rakudo * (a "usable Perl 6") will be relased on July 29, just a few days before YAPC::EU.

There are going to be several Perl 6 related talks in the regular schedule:

I am also happy that Patrick Michaud, the pumking and lead developer of Rakodo will also be in the class. As in previous ocassions in Oslo and Lisbon I am sure it will be fun.

If you are interested please register now.

How other languages do it?

2010-07-07T22:45:19+00:00

Some people asked how communities of other languages deal with the issues I raised in my grant proposal Unfortunatelly it seems that some not all the comments submitted to that blog reach Karen for approval.

Specifically I have submitted this one already three times and she has not seen it yet. If you have submitted any comment there, please check if it has appeared and if not, please post it somewhere else. Maybe in your blot or as a response to this blog.

Now to the other languages:

As far as I can tell the PHP community does not have any Foundation (but it has Zend behind it). Ruby seem to have a hardly working Ruby Association. Both of these languages are used by lots of small companies making money directly from the use of the language or platforms built on the language.

Lua has a corporate sponsorship program but I don't see a lot of details about it. As far as I can tell it is mostly supported by the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. See About Lua for links.

Python have the Python Software Foundation that I analyzed in "Python Software Foundation" a bit a few weeks ago. As you can see Allison Randal is on the board of PSF and she is also on t he board of TPF so maybe she can tell us a few words on how this works at the Python Foundation. There are also quite a number of small companies using Python as part of their core business and as far as I know Google also directly supports it.

Parrot also has a Parrot Foundation with an Advisory board.

I don't see hundreds of individuals and small companies making money using Perl. There are a few but as far as I can tell it is mostly used in large companies and many people are using it as part of the toolset not as the main tool.

perl hacks: Modern Perl at OpenTech

2010-07-06T08:21:20+00:00

I mentioned a few months ago that I'd be running an "Introduction to Modern Perl" training course at YAPC::Europe this year. But in the interests of speaking outside of the Perl community as much as possible, I'm also going to be giving a slightly different version of that course at the OpenTech conference in London in September.

I say "slightly different", but that's a bit of an understatement. The original training course runs for six hours. The OpenTech talk is twenty minutes. But hopefully that will be long enough to introduce some people to many of the interesting things that are going on in the Perl world.

It you're going to be in London in September, then the OpenTech conference is always a lot of fun. I highly recommend that you come along. It's cheap too - just a fiver on the door.

First contact with companies regarding the Perl Ecosystem group

2010-07-05T14:18:36+00:00

Creating the initial list of potential members "List of potential members of the TPF Ecosystem group or Advisory board" was the easy part. I just listed the names of the companies and the source where I got the names from. Either a person, or a link to a web site or a link to a job offer on jobs.perl.org.

In some cases I already have direct contact to a CTO or some other manager as we met on one of the previous events or as Renee Baecker or one of my other friends introduced me.

For now I'll keep in touch with those but I think I won't get in touch with other companies until I understand that TPF would be ok by receiving money. Yeah that sounds strange but right now it seems they don't know what to do with the money they have.

So what happens, when I start building the contacts?

Direct contacts

In the case where I got the information from a person directly I can try to ask that person to introduce me to their CTO, CIO, VP RnD or even the CEO, for smaller companies. In some cases they can do that. In others I'll will need to look for alternative routes.

For companies that have already sponsored a Perl event I'll ask the event organizer to help me get introduced. For companies that are clients of some of the training companies I hope we can use the already existing contacts.

Without personal contact

The difficult part will be the companies that are listed on jobs.perl.org. I prefer not to cold call them as that is hard and usually leads to quick rejection. Sending an e-mail to the address on the job offer would probably not work well either. They are looking for CVs there. I guess trying to get in touch with them that way will lead to nowhere in the good case and backfire in the bad case.

So there I'll need to work harder and find someone who already works there. For that there are two good tools. LinkedIn and Xing which is a more German focused service.

The first contact

I don't think contacting a CTO or an HR manager with "give some money to TPF" will work well. I'll first need to prepare some description of what does TPF and the Perl community do now and ask the person on the other end if we can help them somehow in their use of Perl. The text itself will need to be refined over time and there might be different versions depending the job description of the recipient or the size of the company.

In the description of what TPF does and what we are planning to do with the money I'll probably include a lot more than just the promotional part. TPF provides grants for development of Perl 5, CPAN modules and Perl 6. I'll probably will need to put together a list of sucessful projects and a list of projects that could be done. Or could be done faster if there was money for a grant.

Getting support from the community

Alberto commented on my grant requests that it is too egocentric. My point was to show that I'll do the hard work.

With that said, my understand is that while there needs to be a lot of organizational work behind this it is critical for the success of the project that the Perl community will embrace it. It is critical that people will raise their hands we also use Perl a lot and help me get in touch with the managers so we can build a business level contact as well.

IMHO it is also critical that a growing number of people in the Perl community will help in promoting Perl just by going to various events and talk about it. Either in formal presentations or at a Perl booth.

List of potential members of the TPF Ecosystem group or Advisory board

2010-07-05T14:18:01+00:00

In "Grant request for fund-raising and promotional activities" I wrote about the need to create a list of 100 companies that would be the first prospects to contact regarding membership in the TPF Ecosystem Group or Advisory Board. If TPF decides to set that up.

Source of company names

Several people contacted me and sent me names of companies and I also looked at a number of obvious places. Just within a day or so I had a list of 200 companies. (but I got distracted by some of the comments on my grant proposal so I only blog about this now)

The most obvious companies are those that have been sponsoring one or more of the Perl related events in the last 2-3 years or that gave money direcly to TPF. The former are listed on the web sites of the events. The latter - to some extent - are listed on the web site of TPF.

Then there are also the companies that make money using some Perl related product. e.g. WebGUI, Bricolage, Bugzilla, RT, and OTRS. For most of these products there are several companies providing services based on the product.

The biggest source of companies is of course jobs.perl.org. Companies that look for Perl developers obviously use Perl. Some of those might be even interested in helping Perl development financially.

There is another great source and that's the list of clients of the various Perl training companies. I have not harvested those lists yet as I already had twice as many as I was planning for and I think it would be better to do it in cooperation with the relevant training company.

There are many other places to look for companies, I think there must be a few thousands that might be relevant at some level but we have to focus on the ones that are most likely to see the benefit.

The companies that are already involved in the Perl community to some level and the companies that need Perl developers NOW.

I don't make the list public as it already contains contact info of a few people but it will be part of the CRM database of TPF. If they think it is important to start doing active fund-raising. If they are ready to pay for the time spent doing it and if they find me suitable for that job.

Looking for Perl Ecosystem leader and event goer in the US and elsewhere

2010-07-04T19:14:31+00:00

The comment of Alberto about my grant proposal was very disturbing to me for a few days but finally I managed to catch him online today and we had a chat.

One of the things that came out that is that I should clarify my intent:

Events

I hope that within 1-2 years the Perl community will have a presence on 30-50 non-perl events every year. Not only would that be physically impossible for me to attend all of them, it would also be very expensive and in some cases useless. So my plan was to participate on a few of them (along with several volunteers) and try to get others on the other events.

My plan was that I kick start the activity and then hand it over to others, closer to the various places and people who speak the local dialect. Those local leaders would do the local organization. They would also be compensated for their time just as I do.

As time passes more and more events will be organized by local volunteers and then we can probably stop paying for the central organizers. We can already see that people get organized to setup Perl presence on various events such as Devconf Russia and OSWC in Malaga, Spain. Jay Hannah also started to organize people to go to the Central Iowa Software Symposium and to Infotec in Omaha, NE. Not to mention Renee Baecker who organizes Perl presence on a number of events in Germany and Switzerland.

Fund-raising

I don't think we can do fund-raising in such a distributed way but there could be country or area specific people who are responsible for the fund-raising in their own country or area. They would also be paid for their time.

The search

I did not want to start with looking for more people for more "leaders" for this as we don't have the money to pay them but in the discussion Alberto suggested I should clarify this and ask if anyone would be interested?

Even if we cannot yet start it in such a split way we could discuss things and we could plan some things ahead.

I am writing this thinking about someone in the US, but if people from other areas or countries are interested please just substitute the name of your country.

I have slightly mixed the requirements of the "event organizer" and the "fund-raiser" but I still think about them as a mixture.

Enthusiastic about this who belives that we can actually raise the funds and spend them on Perl.
Thinks that the Perl community needs more promotion
Lives in the target area to make traveling cheaper.
The conference organizer needs to be able to participate on many events.
S/he needs to be able to "work the floor". Not only sitting behind the booth.
The fund raiser needs to be able to allocate at least one day a week (compensated). Not a few ours in the evenings as a large part of the work needs to be done in business hours talking to CTOs and alike
The person needs to be able to take the risk. If we cannot raise money we won't be paid.
We need a commitment of at least 6 months, even if the compensation is low due to lack of success in fund-raising.
Be able to talk to Python developers when they start their anti-Perl FUD, without punching them in the face.

That's it for now. So if you are interested, please reply to this post and/or e-mail me or ping me on IRC.

List of upcoming tech events

2010-07-04T14:30:56+00:00

In "Grant request for fund-raising and promotional activities" I mentioned I'll go over the list of tech events and try to refresh them. Unfortunatelly only 2 or 3 people made any changes to the wiki since then but today in the morning I went over the list. It took me about 4 hours and as I can see I'll need to do this at least once a month as there are many events that are not yet scheduled for next year.

In addition I signed up to the mailing lists of several Perl Monger groups and sent them messages listing all the events that are near to where they group is located. To some value if "near".

From one of the replies I learned that there is going to be a Perl track at Software Libre Open Source World Conference in Malaga That looks nice.

Thank you for YAPC::NA!

2010-06-30T10:36:53+00:00

I should write a more detailed report on how was YAPC::NA for me but for now I just would like to say thank you! I am a bit afraid to thank them one by one as I might miss some of the names but the people I had most interaction were:

Heath Bair, the Chairman of YAPC::NA 2010 who did a terrific job getting the things together. Len Jaffe who made the T-shirst and also helped me with the T-shirts I was selling. Rob Kinyon who took care of all the talks and landed me far too many talk in the last minute. Jonathan Hogue who not only was an organizer but who also let me stay at his place the night before and after YAPC. Not only the money saving but the fact that I can be with real people and not in a hotel room make a lot of difference! Gary (Henderson ?) is not even a Perl hacker but he spent so many hours in the hospitality room and helped so many people that it is hard to know how to thank him for this.

Krishna Sethuraman was not a local organizer but he spent lots of time setting up the video and running around making sure the cameras are recording. He also picked me up at the airport and helped me a lot getting around.

Thanks to all of you!

And now something else but related. There were a number of people at YAPC::NA who came to me and said thank you for starting Padre, you know the Perl IDE, or for my Perl promotional work. It was awesome feeling. There are some really nice people in the Perl community. This can give energy even when other things make me unhappy. (see yesterdays blog) Thank you too!

Some pictures of YAPC::NA 2010.

Chrome DevFest Israel

2010-06-30T00:37:27+00:00

Today I attended the Chrome DevFest Israel. It was a day of talks and food free of charge at the Avenue Convention Center in the Airport City which is just 20 min drive from where I live with no traffic jams.

Already during the nice breakfast they served I noticed a number of people I know from various open source events I attended recently. I also met an old friend who now works at Google and who has several times asked me already if I was interested in a position at Google. Frankly, until now I was quite sure I don't want to work for Google. My main issue is that I don't think I could become enthusiastic about the technologies of a single company and promote them. But then I talked to someone during the event who told me quite a lot about the open development process of Google and I liked it very much.

Then I came home and read the comments of Dave Rolsky on my my grant request and I got quite upset. I think his comments are disturbing me even more than the comments of Casey West. Especially as Dave was involved in the process of building up my ideas during the previous few months back when I was still thinking of doing this as a separate organization.

I'll have to calm down, maybe have a good sleep and try to analyse his points only tomorrow.

In the meantime I feel that maybe I could be more useful for Google than for the Perl community.

The people I met during the breakfast were mostly Python programmers and PHP programmers. I think I have not seen a single Perl developer there. Oh yes, I met one whom I did not know earlier and who seemed to be enthusiastic about Perl. Unfortunatelly I don't have his contact info.

Perl on Python

The good part of the morning meetings was that I got invited to the monthly Python meetings to give a talk about Perl. We discussed two topics. One would be CPAN and the other Perl 6. As I have only 45 minutes I think I might give a 2-3 min intro to CPAN with an offer to talk about it at another time and then I'll focus on Perl 6.

The presentations

After some general welcome talks, the morning track was split up into a Dev Track and a Web Track. I attended the first one where we had 3 talks: Chrome Apps store and Chrome Extensions, Chrome Developer Tools, and HTML5.

While I was expecting a bit more talk about business in the first presentation (though it is unclear why did I expect that from talks in the dev room) the was good and if I wanted to do some Chrome hacking I could get started.

In the meantime it gave me ideas how we might build something similar on top of CPAN (or next to it) to let people monetize their investment. I think it is awesome that CPAN has so many modules and I hear - from the Perl community - that others envy it but maybe we are missing out on a lot of other interesting things if we could help people make money on writing CPAN modules or applications built on CPAN modules.

Thay want Chrome to become a platform on top of which people can develop and distribute their applications. That will further move people away from their desktop as now they can use their applications on any machine.

As more development moves to be within the browser using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript I wonder what does that leave to the backend languages, especially Perl. Would embedding Parrot into the browser(s) be the key to make these languages importan at the front-end as well? What about our investment in Padre, the Perl IDE? Would that become obsolete as it is using the desktop paradigm? Could we turn it into a platform to build applications on top of it just as Eclipse has been doing?

The lunch was good and while I did not have lots of energy trying to talk to people I met a few more people I knew and a few new faces. Especially interesting was to meet Lior Kesos again who told me about his Cantina project which is inspired by La Cantine in Paris.

On the way home I picked up my new Samsung N150 netbook that will replace my notebook that has a broken internal screen.

Perl Ecosystem development group or Advisory board for TPF?

2010-06-29T10:34:54+00:00

In relation to my my grant request weveral people asked what exactly would companies join so let me try to clarify it here.

Companies would pay an annual fee to TPF. The money goes into the bank account of TPF and initially budgetted to cover the expenses of the events group and my fee. The events group is participating at events, showing Perl and Perl related projects at the Perl booth, giving related talks, etc. My fee covers the time I spend on developing relationships with companies.

Companies that pay the annual fee would in return become part of a group, we can call it either Perl Ecosystem Development Group or maybe even better Advisory Board of the TPF. Each company can delegate 1-3 people (maybe based on company size?). They don't get voting rights in the TPF but it will provide them a way to communicate with each other and with the Perl community.

They might get voting rights within the group/advisory board.

The GNOME Foundation has an Advisory Board. On that page you'll find the roles and responsibilities of the Advisory Board Members.

Directions of perl 5 development

For example I can envision that the members would discuss the directions that Perl 5 should take. We collect the ideas and present them to the Perl 5 Porters. The Perl 5 porters can then discuss the ideas. The ones that seem to be reasonable for them as well get either implemented - if someone has the tuits for that - or they can build a grant requests around the items. Seeing the price the Advisory Board members can decide if they want to finance the features or not and pay out of their own pocket.

The same can go for CPAN modules.

This will allow the financing of features in perl that the Perl porters also feel useful.

"I just slammed out 300 resume applications for which I am more than qualified for this week, I doubt I will hear from even one"

2010-06-28T03:14:49+00:00

A recent poster to reddit asked I just slammed out 300 resume applications for which I am more than qualified for this week, I doubt I will hear from even one.....any advice for [engineering] job hunting?

If I'm hiring people, the slammed out resumes mean nothing to me. You want to know the number one way to attract my attention? Write a cover letter that says that you've actually done some research into the job for which you're applying.

It's a buyer's market out there. You're putting your resume out there with, say, 500 other applicants. Wading through that much shotgunned resume crap is daunting at best. Give me something to grab hold of. Give me a reason to say "Hey, this looks interesting."

Don't waste your time applying for 300 positions. There are not 300 positions out there for which you are qualified, and that you would be happy doing. Instead of shotgunning them, work on two or three or five and really get into understanding the job. Research the company. Research what they need. Find out everything about the company that you can, and spend the time figuring out what you bring to the table that will help the company the most.

Finally, those 300 applications came from where, Monster or some job site? Less then 10% of jobs get filled through job boards. Personal networking accounts for about two thirds of job placement. Instead of wasting time with shotgunning resumes that are obviously shotgunned, work to talk to everyone you can and find pointers to other people who can help you find a job. The jobs are out there, but you have to know where they are.

Grant request for fund-raising and promotional activities

2010-06-27T04:36:58+00:00

Last week my grant request was published. There are several comments already and I hope that within two weeks the board of The Perl Foundation will be ready to approve it.

Let me outline what are going to be my first steps once the grant request gets approved:

1. I'll go over and refresh the events list. I'll ask the help of the various Perl Monger goups to list even more events. These can be events they plan to attend anyway or events that are near by where they live even if they don't (yet) plan to attend. Once we have an updated list I'l try to analyse what type are the events, how many people are expected and what kind of people. Then we can decide at which event are we going to have presence of Perl and how can we accomplish that.

2. I'll want to create a list of about 100 companies that are potential members of the Perl Ecosystem group. For this too I will need the help of the general Perl community. I will need to locate companies that have some serious dependency on Perl. Primarily the companies that are already giving sponsorship to Perl events, but not only those. We will need to establish contact with many other companies even if they are not yet connected to the community. After all one of the main objectives of the group is to setup and improve the communication between companies using Perl and the Perl community.

3. Once the initial list is established I will start building up contacts with the companies. More specifically I'll start talking to CTOs or other managers who are related to the Perl develoers in their company. That will be done via members of the Perl community who work at the specific companies or via LinkedIn or Xing or cold calling if I cannot find an easier path.

Actually the first two items can already be started even before the approval of the grant. So let's see what can we do in the next couple of days?

Can you spend 5 minutes going over the list of events we already have adding entries for events you know about that are not yet listed? Just list every past or future event you know about.

Can you spend another minute and send me the name of the company you are working for? Even if you think the company won't give a dime I would like to list them so I start with a larger list and then focus. (The list of companies will NOT be public.) Besides, who knows, I might be able to convince them on the importance of such membership.

If you really have time then please read the grant proposal and add your comment to it. The TPF board will want to get input from many people to see if the Perl community can accept the concept of me being paid for fund-raising and for promotional work.

perl hacks: YAPC::Europe Talks Accepted

2010-06-23T08:06:08+00:00

The YAPC::Europe organisers said that they would tell speakers which talks had been accepted on July 1st. Well, it seems that the excitement was too much for them and they decided to do it a week earlier. Yesterday I got email telling me that some of my talks had been accepted and the list of accepted talks is now on the web site. As always, it looks like a really interesting conference.

I've had two twenty-minute talks accepted:

The Perl Community
The Perl community is a complex and interesting city. I've been exploring it for almost fifteen years and I'm not sure that I've been to every corner of it.

In this talk I'll attempt to guide you round some of the more interesting and useful parts of the Perl community. I'll point out some ancient monuments, some nice new areas and warn you about some places where you really shouldn't walk alone after dark.

Things I Learned From Having Users‎
When I first started releasing modules to CPAN it was great. I released modules that no-one used. I could release new versions as and when I wanted to.

Then people started using a couple of my modules. I started to get email about them. Suddenly my modules were no longer just for me. I had to deal with users.

In this talk I'll discuss how having users effects the way that you develop and release software. I'll also look at a few ways to keep on top of things.

I'm also doing my first lightning talk for several years:

‎Perl Vogue‎

You might not believe it to look at us, but the Perl community is a deeply fashionable place. If you're not using the currently fashionable modules in your code then people will be sneering at you behind your back.

Join Dave Cross for a quick review of the history of Perl fashion.

See you in Pisa.

The Working Geek news roundup for 2010-06-17

2010-06-18T03:39:39+00:00

These links are collected from The Working Geek's Twitter feed. If you have suggestions for news bits, please mail me at andy@theworkinggeek.com.

Job hopping is career crack for losers: (corcodilos.com)
Sometimes you just suck it up for an hour: (askamanager.blogspot.com)
New programming jargon (via @sachmet) (globalnerdy.com)
Seven reasons you may not be getting a job (usnews.com)
The job hunting paradox (tompeters.com)
Find the job before it even exists (karenburnsworkinggirl.com)
How one sentence can make or break your job search (freelancefolder.com)
You don't need anyone's permission to get work experience in software (atalasoft.com)
When was the last time you were thanked? (theworkinggeek.com)
My June column in PragPub: How to get fired correctly (pragprog.com)
How to get a job in an awful economy (consumerist.com)
@punkrockhr nails it again: Job Search 101: Interviewing (punkrockhr.com)
Slides from Josh Berkus and Ian Dees' Give a Great Tech Talk at Open Source Bridge (slideshare.net)
How to do a web resume right (theworkinggeek.com)
Interview rule #1 in my mind: "Make it easy for us to hire you" (punkrockhr.com)
So you think you want to be a consultant? (unixwiz.net)
RT @scalzi: "The failure mode of clever is 'asshole.'"
Ten signs you probably don't want that job, anyway (punkrockhr.com)

Comparing Perl and Python

2010-06-17T13:16:46+00:00

Standing at a Perl booth at technical events gives you a lot of opportunities to talk to nice people. They often ask how do Perl and Python compare. I try to be diplomatic, even if that does not always work. Here is what I tend to answer:

Size and complexity

Perl, the language is much larger than Python so probably it takes longer time to learn Perl than Python but in the end you have a more expressive language.

The standard libraries of Python cover a lot more fields than those of Perl as Python has an approach of batteries included while Perl is now following a "small core" approach. This makes it easier to distribute simple applications written in Python as they have a better chance of not needing any external dependencies except a specific version of Python.

On the other hand CPAN is the killer feature of Perl. It has a lot more extensions than Python has. It has a central location with a standardized installation process and a standardized way of installing dependencies.

Lastly on the application development level it seems that you can find a lot more application frameworks and a lot more ready made applications written in Python than in Perl.

Approach and community

That's one direction of comparing the two languages. The other one is the general approach to things. Python programmers have the idea of There should be one obvious way to solve a problem while Perl programmers tend to think in TMTODWDI - There's More Than One Way To Do It.

This leads to an interesting clash in the cultures. People who prefer more centralized governing will tend to use Python and think that it is the right way to do things. Seeing people use Perl makes them nerveous or even aggressive.

On the other hand Perl programmers will think there is more than one way to do things. One of them can be Python.

This can give them a much more relaxed approach.

At least I hope so.

About the German Perl Workshop

2010-06-14T11:23:24+00:00

The last week I was in Germany. First I spent one day at the German Perl Workshop in Schorndorf (near Stuttgart) and then 4 days at LinuxTag in Berlin.

My flight left at 5:00 am on Sunday which meant I could not get much sleep the night before. Luckily I could sleep on the plane. The connection in Zurich is funny. At every gate and door the signs directing you to the other terminal also include the time it takes to get there. That can calm you down quite a bit as you know what to expect.

After landing in Stuttgart I took the train to Schorndorf where Rolf Schaufelberger picked me up. We found out that the tuits have not arrived yet. I sent out a quick message to the supplier without much hope as they are in the US and by the time they see the e-mail I'd already be leaving. Rolf has a very nice house with a graden and if I wasn't that tired I would even helped him cutting the lawn. Instead of that I just fell asleep.

In the evening we drove to Stuttgart to meet the people at the pre-conference pub. There were a couple of people from Munich already and within an hour we were I think some 20 people there. Including mst with his, well, hair. You have to see it for yourself.

On Monday early morning we went to Schorndorf. First we went to the office of PlusW, the company Rolf runs and we were partially happy. The tuits have arrived but someone had to pick them up from the tax authorities.

Once we arrived they setup the registration table and I setup an extension to it where I would catch people and try to talk to them about the events group and in parallel try to do some fundraising for TPF by selling some shirts.

See pictures of the registration table at GPW

I also managed to get a 10 min slot just after the opening speach of Rolf to talk about the Perl events group. From the feedback later that day it is clear I still have to improve the message and that no matter what, personal conversations in small groups have way bigger effects than talks in front of a crowd. Nevertheless I need to improve the talk and turn it into a 5 min lightning talk so I can offer it at YAPC::NA next week.

In the evening we had the "social event" of the workshop at a near-by pub. The food was good but we had live music that unfortunatelly made it very difficult to have any reasonable conversation inside. So most of the time while the band was playing I was outside talking to people. I almost missed the sweets.

Unfortunatelly the next day I had to leave early to catch my flight to Berlin where I was about to setup a Perl booth. That mean I missed all the talks in English. In any case I think it was worth to go for even one day to GPW as I hope I managed to raise some awareness to the events group. For sure two of the participants of GPW (Tina Mueller and Gabi Hack) later came to the Perl booth at LinuxTag to help. I am quite sure some of the others will also help out with the various other events.

Lots of thanks to the organizers and especially Rolf who let me stay in his house.

How to do a web resume right

2010-06-14T04:59:29+00:00

I'm humbled checking out the web resume for my friend Julian Cash. It hits all the right buttons.

Catchy domain name, hirethisgeek.com.
Strong bulleted overview of his skills on the front page.
Links to key points in the margin on the right, and at the bottom of each page
Subpages about important areas of interest (project management, programming, etc)
Contact information at the bottom of every page
Testimonials page, although I'd put some information about each person to give weight to their words.

If you can get your web resume to be even one tenth as interesting as Julian's, you're way ahead of your competition.

perl hacks: YAPC::Europe Talks

2010-06-11T15:13:45+00:00

The Call for Papers for YAPC::Europe closes in four days. If you're thinking of giving a talk in Pisa then this weekend would be a very good time to give it some serious thought.

I proposed four talks last night. I'm hoping that the organisers won't choose more than two of them, but I like to give them a bit of choice. The titles are as follows:

The Perl Community
Web Services for Fun and Profit
Things I Learned From Having Users
Perlanet Update

I've also submitted a proposal for a lightning talk called "Perl Fashion". It's been several years since I've given a lightning talk, so that'll be an interesting experience.

Don't forget that there are also training courses (including my course on Modern Perl).

Looking forward to the conference very much. Hope to see some of you there.

perl hacks: How Not to Ask a Question

2010-06-10T13:17:06+00:00

I received this email last week. I often get random email from people I don't know asking for help with Perl problems and I'm happy to help whenever I can (although I always point our that Perl Monks is going to get better answers in less time).

But if you're going to ask random strangers for help, you should probably make a bit more effort than this person did. I've reformatted it and corrected the English.

Hello sir,

I am new developer in perl scripting language using MVC Frame works, my doubt is how to write below query in MVC.
$query = "select belarc_update_dt
           from   Device
           where  belarc_update_dt  >  $expiry_date
           AND    belarc_update_dt <= $current_date
           AND    (scrapped_on > $current_date
                   OR scrapped_on = '0000-00-00')";
the above query how to write in mvc frameork can we please help me sir,

Thanks and Regards

How would you reply to mail like that?

Update: I asked which MVC framework he was using. He replied:

I am using CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser' with linux shell.

At that point I gave up.

davblog: Killing Maggie

2010-06-09T11:52:03+00:00

It's twenty years since she left office, but Tories still don't understand the depth of the hatred that Maggie Thatcher engendered in a large proportion of the population. Amongst my group of friends we had a agreement that any of us who got within striking distance of her would do our best to do her some serious damage.

Of course, there was no danger that anyone would ever get close enough to her that we would be called on to back up these threats with action. It was just a joke that we shared.

Well, until the day I found myself within striking distance.

At some point in 1993 I was in Madrid airport waiting for a flight back to London. We were in the departure lounge, the plane could be seen on the runway, but we weren't boarding. We waited and waited but they didn't let us board. Eventually, over thirty minutes late, we were called and started to make our way onto the flight.

As we were called, I was standing closest to the exit from the departure lounge, so I was the first person to head towards the plane. As I went through the tunnel to the plane, a door opened in the side and a small group of people appeared in the tunnel. They had obviously circumvented the usual check-in procedures and had come up some stairs from the tarmac.

And one of them was Maggie. I was standing about three feet from her.

Of course I did nothing. If I had, you would have known about it. "Yobbo Pushes Maggie Down Steps" would have been the headline in all of the British papers the next day.

I just stood there blinking as she (along with the rest of her party) was whisked onto the plane - where they were secreted in the first class section. By the time I got onto the plane, they were nowhere to be seen.

Of course there was no way I was ever going to do anything. Our bragging about doing something to her was just that - bragging. It was a one in a million chance that I was ever in a position to even consider making good on my promises.

But in my lifetime, there has never been a politician who split the nation like Maggie did. Of course, the number of people who loved her was larger than the number of people who hated her. But those of us who hated her, hated her passionately.

Which is why I (along with many people) can completely understand what John McDonnell said yesterday. Of course it was a joke, but it was a joke that will resonate deeply with almost half of the population who lived through the 1980s in the UK.

If I had a vote in the Labour leadership election, I'd be seriously considering giving it to McDonnell. He's obviously my kind of politician.

Update: I highly recommend listening to Elvis Costello's Tramp The Dirt Down.

Busy June: German Perl Workshop, LinuxTag, YAPC::NA, Belgian Perl Workshop

2010-06-05T10:25:21+00:00

June will be really busy for me. Tomorrow heading to Schorndorf (near Stuttgart) in Germany to participate on the first day of the German Perl Workshop.

German Perl Workshop

I don't have a talk scheduled but I plan to setup a "booth" where I hope to talk to people about the events group of TPF and we can promote Perl on non-Perl events. On the GPW there are 103 registered people and 68 committed. Besides standing there and talking to people I also have a bunch of Perl Mongers T-shirts I have left in my flat that people ordered 4 years ago and never paid and picked up. I'll sell those shirts and the "profit" will go to cover the expenses of the TPF events group.

Torsten Raudssus (aka Getty) will bring an additional bunch of polo-shirts. As he works in a printing shop he was kind enough to deal with the printing of a bunch of Perl::Staff shirts to be given to the people manning the Perl booth at LinuxTag in Berlin and a bunch of Perl+Onion shirts to be sold on GPW.

I'll stay at the place of Rolf Schaufelberger who was kind enough to offer this. This is awesome. Both because it brings more social interaction and because it saves me a few bucks in my already expensive month.

LinuxTag Berlin

On Tuesday, 8th June I'll take a flight to Berlin. There I'll stay at the place of Jochen Hayek from the Berlin Perl Mongers. There are a number of people who will help maintaining the Perl booth at LinuxTag. We got a huge space there. Some 25 sqm. On Friday and Saturday, Sheila Sijtsema from Booking.com will also join us. She will be there to present the job offers of Booking. So if you are in the area and want to have a chat with her, that's the time to come. In addition to the booth I am also giving a talk Automatic testing in the Open Source world and what businesses can learn from them which is basically showing how the Perl 5, Rakudo and Parrot smoking and the CPAN Testers work.

I also submitted a request for a Perl 6 workshop but I'll get their approval or rejection only tomorrow so I am not yet sure what will happen with that.

The organizers tell us that there will be some 10,000 visitors. I personally hope we will have some 500-1,000 people visiting our booth interested in Perl at some level.

Heading home on the 13th.

YAPC::NA

On the 18th I take another flight to Columbus, Ohio to participate on YAPC::Na. I have one talk scheduled Working with upstream - Distributing Perl modules from CPAN and there are tons of talks I'd like to see but I think most of the time I'll spend at a table turning my "hallway track" participation into something more structured. I'll see how this works out. According to the website there are now 291 registered users and 210 are already committed.

Belgian Perl Workshop

Finally on my way home from the US I'll stop by for half a day in Brussels on the 26th June to participate on the Belgian Perl Workshop. I have several talk proposals there. We'll see which one will be accepted.

They are expecting 30-40 people there.

Most of my time during these conferences will be spent on talking to people about the Perl events group. Here is how I'd propose a lightning talk about the subject.

About the Perl events group of The Perl Foundation

We were at FOSDEM. We were at CeBIT. We will have been in LinuxTag Berlin.

A few minutes on the fun in promoting Perl to the few (thousands) who don't (yet) attend YAPCs and Perl Workshops.

Starting with Perl 6

2010-06-03T13:53:13+00:00

This entry was first sent out as part of the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats. Visit here to subscribe.

Welcome back to the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats

My 12 year old son had several attempts to learn programming already. He started to build a web application in Perl but without the basics and without understand English he kept getting stuck with simple things such as references and 5 dimensional hashes.

A few days ago we decied to put him through my regular Perl 5 training material that will let him learn the basics. He seems to be mature enough now that he can find the joy in creating even console based games. At least he might understand the need to go a bit slower and not jump into a web application.

I started to teach him Perl 5 and programming in general. We decided on Perl 5 as that's what I know the most and its a mature language so he will be able to continue to write his web application. In a few days we learned about scalars, basic I/O (print and ), chomp, if conditions, strings and numbers, while loops, int, rand. We already started to learn about reading and writing files.

All this time I kept feeling that my training material does not fit someone who does not have the basic concepts of a computer yet and has no background in programming. Also there were all kinds of things I had to explain that were just not clear. e.g. the need for chomp, why to write the "or die" part of open() at all?

The former I could manage by adjusting the lectures to his needs, skipping slides that were not relevant and adding more explanations where needed. I could not deal with the latter part, that are just issues with Perl 5.

Yesterday I decided that I stop the whole Perl 5 course and switch over to teach him Perl 6. After all his main interest is to learn programming and to build a game for himself and for his frinds. It does not need to be production grade and by the time he reaches the point that he wants this to be on a public server we will have a much more mature Perl 6 implementation.

This will also give me an opportunity to go over my training material with the eyes of someone totally new to programming.

Getting Rakudo

In order to make life easier for my son I built Rakudo for him follow the instructions on how to get Rakudo

I added the directory of rakudo to the PATH so it will be easy for him to run perl6 from the comman line.

BTW he is using Ubuntu 10.4

Setting up Padre for Perl 6

I also installed Padre from CPAN (using local::lib) and installed the Padre::Plugin::Perl6 from CPAN.

Once I launched Padre I went to Tools/Plug-in Manager and enabled the Perl 6 plugin.

Then I went to Tools/Preferences/File and colors in File type: I selected Perl 6 and in Highlighter STD.pm That will provide syntax highlighting for files with p6 extension.

I also turned on View/Show Syntax check

Perl 6

Let's start the code now:

  use v6;              # Even though this is not enforced when using
                       # Rakudo better to declare the version of perl.
                       # This will avoid lots of head scratching
                       # when you run it with perl 5 by mistake.

  say 42;              # prints 42 and a newline
  say "hello world";   # prints hello world and a newline

This was the first time, after about 2 minues in Perl 6 that he said "Oh that's simpler".

Values need to be stored in boxes .... so the values of the boxes can be changed later. Therefore the boxes are called "variables". The scalar values such as numbers and strings can be stored in so called scalar variables.

  my $x = 42;          # Scalar variables start with $ and include
                       # letters and numbers and underscore.
                       # They are declared using the "my" keyword.
  say $x;              # They can be used just as regular scalar values.

Earlier I already explained to him that this is different from math. Here the = sign means assignment. So the previous statement means put 42 in the box that is called $x.

  my $name = prompt("type your name: ");

                       # This will print the string on the screen and then
                       # wait for the user to type in some text and press enter.
                       # This replaces the <STDIN> we had in perl 5.

He asked where is chomp. There is no need for chomp here as prompt() automatically removes the newlines. "Oh nice", he said.

Conditionals

  if $age == 12 {
      say "he is 12";
  }

The if conditional does not need to have parentheses around it. This looks strange to me but it he found it simpler.

I had to point out here that we have ==, two equeal signs that mean we are not assigning values but checking if they are equal or not. I also had to explain about the difference between numerical == and string 'eq'. I think this will need more explanation though.

else, and elseif are the same as in Perl 5 so you can write:

  if $age < 12 {
      # young
  } else {
      # old
  }

or you can write

  if $age < 11 {
      # too young
  } elsif $age > 13 {
      # to old
  } else {
      # good
  }

Then I showed him the chained comparison possibilities:

  if (11 <= $age <= 13) {
      say "Good, $age is in the range. We can play soccer.";
  } else {
      say "No partner for game";
  }

He loved that it is just like in math.

while loop

For English speakers it might be obvious what a while loop does but others better translate the word for themselves and build a real sentence with it. In English it sound like this:

While this is true do this.

In perl 6 it looks like this:

  while this is true {
      do this
  }

and with a real example it looks like this:

  my $num = 50;
  while $num >= 50 {
      $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ");
  }

Actually my son kept writing code like this:

  my $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ");
  while $num >= 50 {
      $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ");
  }

I am not 100% sure how to elminate that duplication in a way that will make sense to him as well. He thinks about this as "Ask the user. If the answer is incorrect, ask again."

I would probably write this code:

  my $num;
  while not defined $num or $num >= 50 {
      $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ");
  }

which translates to "While no correct value ask for a value".

Maybe this would make more sense though:

  my $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ")
      while not defined $num or $num >= 50;

Which is "Ask for a value as long as it is incorrect".

The "not defined $num" part still seems to be as unnecessary in this case but that is currently required.

I asked on the #perl6 IRC channel for a more natural solution. I got several suggestions in a few seconds. The one that seemed to make sense the most to me was:

  while (my $num = prompt("Please give a number smaller than 50: ")) >= 50 {}

Here we need the extra parentheses around the assignment or the >= comparision would take precedence.

There was one thing that tripped us is that code like this:

  while ($num >= 50){
  }

is incorrect. People who are used to write extensive spaces won't fall in that trap but many beginners skip spaces in all kinds of places.

In this case you need to either add a space between the closing parentheses and the opening curly or omit the parentheses at all.

That's all for now.

This entry was first sent out as part of the Perl 6 Tricks and Treats. Visit here to subscribe.

Ease of bug reporting == caring for the users?

2010-05-31T18:52:24+00:00

Being on the #perlde, the German IRC channel I got into an argument about the difficulty in submitting bug reports to Padre. One of the comment went as far as saying: if he doesn't care about other people he should not publish his software.

Every module on CPAN automatically gets an RT Queue. You cannot opt-out of it. You will get it if you want it and if you don't. In a way this is a good thing as it means no matter how unresponsive the author is the users can always send their bugreports to some place.

Then I heard that there is an author, at least one, who responds to every bug report opened on RT with a harsh messages that tells the user she should send the bug reports directly to him.

Then there is Padre which is using its separate Trac system for bug reports and feature requests. Not only that, but it also requires the reporter to register first and due to heavy spamming the reportert first need to talk to the Padre developers on IRC. These extra steps are clearly reducing the number of bug reports and they might even frustrate some of the potential reporters. After all they just want to report something and get on with their life.

I can symphatize with that a lot. It happened to me many times that I fund a bug in a project and just wanted to report it without further involvement. To me that was enough contribution to the give open source project.

Unfortunatelly that can easily create lots of duplicate bug reports and lots of partially written reports and even many false reports. People can easily report problems that are due to some other issue, not necessarily a bug in the code.

There is a trade-off between ease of reporting bugs and the quality of bug reports. I am quite sure if we made it easier to open a bug report we would ge a lot more of them. We see that people sometimes come to the Padre IRC channel and ask about a behavior they see. In many cases those turn out to be errors outside of Padre and can be fixed in a short discussion. If that was reported as a bug it would have frustrated the developers, created unnecessary work for them and probably the most important would have not solved the problem.

opt-out from RT

So how did Padre opt-out from having an RT Queue? It is simple. We bribed Jesse.

Once we found that it does not work, we learned about the option in META.yml

Setting

  resources:
    bugtracker: http://padre.perlide.org/trac/

will make search.cpan.org display a link to our bug tracker instead of the default RT Queue. The RT queue is still there and is still active but most people will find our own bug tracking system and use that. So far I think we had one bug report there. We copied it to our trac system and mentioned it on th RT report. No big deal. You don't even need to have an account for this on RT.

Would it be good if every CPAN module had its own bug tracking system? Probably not.

So why do I think it is OK for Padre to have one?

Padre is probably one of the largest projects on CPAN though I am not really sure how that can be measured. It is certainly the buggiest. It has 479 open tickets.

Most other large Perl projects are not distributed via CPAN and thus this question was never asked.

Most modules that are on CPAN have a lot less open tickets. Is that because they are smaller in scope? Better tesed? More mature? Unused? Maybe it is because it is harder to open a bug on RT for people who don't yet know how to do it?

BTW as I can see Dancer also uses and external bug tracking system and it has 87 open issues.

When was the last time you were thanked?

2010-05-30T21:39:13+00:00

Seth Godin's blog entry today sums up so much of my frustration with much of what I see on the Net:

Yes, I know you're a master of the web, that you've visited every website written in English, that you've been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.

But what have you shipped?

What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?

Go, do that.

Right on, Seth. To that list of "so you can..." I'd add

You're a master debater on Slashdot and Reddit
You're quick with a link to letmegooglethatforyou.com
You correct people in the ways in which they ask questions in IRC

The tough part is that most of the things that you do "with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world" require you to get off your ass and get out from behind a keyboard.

Ever given a talk at a user group meeting? Ever organized a conference? Or lined up a speaker for a user group meeting? Written an article or blog post where people say "That's changed the way I look at things?" Or created software where people say "I don't know how I lived without this?"

When Seth talks about "moved the dial and changed the world," I'll even set the bar a bit lower. When was the last time someone thanked you for downvoting someone on reddit, or being an oh-so-clever snark poster on Slashdot? Ever received appreciations for pointing out what you perceived as someone's shortcomings in a flame war?

Which is more likely?

"Thanks for telling that guy your negative opinion of him."
"Thanks for that presentation on Ruby modules."
"Thanks for reaching level 75 on Farmville."
"Thanks for putting together this group. I learned a lot."

Get out there from behind your keyboard and do something that builds rather than tears down.

What are the Perl Monger groups for?

2010-05-26T10:40:23+00:00

In the age of Perl Monks, Stack Overflow, IronMan and plenty of topic specific Perl mailig lists I wonder what do you people see as the value of the (location specific) Perl Mongers?

There are plenty of web forums and generic mailing lists where people can get answers to their technical questions in English and probably also in the other major languages as well.

I can see an advantage of the Hungarian Perl mailing list as some people there don't speak any other language than Hungarian and even some of those who can read English have hard time expressing them in English.

OTOH the Israeli Perl mailing list is in English anyway for several reasons. One of them is that it is hard to write plain text going right to left with embedded code going left to right. So there does not seem to be any advantage to use it. (Even though I am sure there too, are several people who have hard time expressing them in English).

There are a few things I can think of:

Coordination of events. If you have face-to-face meetings those are usually very location specific.

Distribution of news. While people can go and read Perl related news on plenty of feeds, many still don't do. The local groups can pick specific items and distribute them among their members. There are currently about 250 Perl Monger groups. If on average they have 50 members then sending out the call to participate in the Perl survey could easily reach 12,500 people.

More comfortable. I think most of the people are more comfortable when talking in small groups with friendly faces. Asking a question on a very public web forum might be intimidating to many people. Asking the same question in your local mailing list might a bit easier. Especially if you know some of the people involved. Which leads us (back?) to the face-to-face meetings.

Communating with local companies. One of the biggest things IMHO we in the Perl community are not doing well enough is talking to companies using Perl. We should ask the managers (CTOs, VP RnDs, CEOs) what do they need that we can help them solve. The local Perl Mongers could do that much better than The Perl Foundation with its limited man power.

What do you think? What are the values in the Perl Mongers? What do you think the Perl Mongers could do more or better?

davblog: BBC Radio Streams

2010-05-26T10:25:50+00:00

I've just written this over on my BBC Radio Streams page:

I've got email from a couple of people saying that the Real Audio radio streams were finally turned off overnight. This means that the few links left on these pages (and any links that you have saved from earlier versions of this page) will no longer work.

I expected this day to come at some point. The BBC really want everyone to use the Radio iPlayer instead.
This does, however, pose a problem for people who where using the Read Audio streams to power internet radios and similar devices. I'm not sure that there's a solution to this problem, but I'll have a poke around and see if I can see if I can find a way around it.

Other than that, I'd just like to say thanks for using these pages during the five and a half years that they have been live. When I sat down to hack out a quick solution in November 2004 I had no idea how many people would find the pages so useful.

I'd also like to thank the BBC for the enlightened approach they took to my pages. They could easy have just asked me to close the site down, but instead they chose to turn a blind eye and take my pages as an indication of something that was missing from their site.

Update: I've just found this entry on the BBC Internet Blog. The BBC have introduced live streaming of their radio stations to various mobile devices. I haven't investigated in detail, but this looks like it might be a replacement for the Real Audio streams.

davblog: Programme for Government

2010-05-20T12:29:14+00:00

Our new coalition government has released full details of its five year programme. They've even produced a web site that contains all of the information (although currently it seems a little broken and is just presenting a page where you can download a PDF).

I thought it was worth digging into it a bit to see what the programme says about some of the issues that the skeptical/rationalist community are interested in.

Firstly, I looked for information about the provision of homeopathy and other "alternative medicine" on the NHS. Sadly, the relevant section of the report is silent on this issue so we don't know yet whether or not the new government is in favour of spending public money on magic water. I should point out that my petition on this subject is still open - although the whole government petitions site is currently in limbo until the new government decides what to do with it.

Next I looked to see what the document said about faith schools. I found one mention. And it's not good news. In the section on schools, it says:

We will work with faith groups to enable more faith schools

So that's a bit of a worry. Of course it doesn't say whether they'll be spending public money on these schools. Hopefully this won't mean more religious-run academies where children are taught that the Earth is 6,000 years old.

Finally, I stepped back and tried to find out what the programme had to say about levels of science and research funding. And at that point, I had a bit of a surprise. Take a look at the list of high-level categories listed on the right hand side of the web site. Do you notice any obvious omissions? Look carefully now.

There is no category that obviously covers science. I downloaded the PDF version of the document and searched for the word "science" thinking that I must have missed something obvious. The word appears in the document twice. The section on the environment says:

As part of a package of measures, we will introduce a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine tuberculosis.

And then the section on schools says:

We will seek to attract more top science and maths graduates to be teachers.

Searching for the word "research" fares a little better (four mentions) but they're still rather specific and give no useful information on how the government feels about science and research spending in general. I find it astonishing that a document like this can find space to talk about badger control and completely avoid the bigger issues. Where is the commitment to levels of spending on science? Where is the discussion of the importance of science-led policy-making?

All in all, this document gives me no comfort at all. I strongly suspect that we're heading for a rather irrational five years. I really hope I'm proved wrong.

Why do you learn Perl?

2010-05-19T23:49:02+00:00

When I start a Perl training class I always ask people why do they learn Perl? Sometimes, I can even send out a questionnaire before the training classes giving people some more time to think about it.

Let me shaer a list of answers I got recently. Without names and removing anything that might reveal company names or personal information.

To broaden and strengthen my current perl experience which was self acquired.
Maintain existing code
Write code for the installation processes
Analyze big text files, search for complex patterns, extract and replace data, create and manage data structures.
The reason I'm taking this course is because I never learned perl and I only learn from looking at written scripts and copy paste from them until it works but most of the times I'm not sure why it worked one way but not the other.
I don't have a current perl project that I have to work on but I maintain perl scripts (not on an every day basis) and now and then I need to add a small script to parse a text file or deal with file operations (copy, rename...). Basically the scripts I maintain parse text and deal with file operations print output to file.
General Perl understanding - reading existing programs and modifying them. Parse files to extract information etc.
I would like to gain basic skills in Perl programming, to be able to write scripting in Perl on Unix/Linux machines which will allow me to automate tests for Software which is installed on a Linux/SUN server. For example: Sampling counters, or HTTP interfaces (All via shell commands), send them from the running machine via mail to external server, run calculations on machines of rates etc'
1. I use Perl during development - to parse log files, build files, sql, sourcecontrol reports etc. Examples: in an sql script, find all create table statements (can be lower or upper case, with or without "", with or without "DBA" prefix) and modify the script to include drop table statement before each corresponding create table. Take a log4j log file, look for "start method X" and then following "end method X" phrases, calculate the diff of timestamps, create a table summarizing total time/avg time/count for all method invocations.
2. Being able to write scripts for production environment - install/patch scripts for example - I imagine such scripts would manipulate (mostly create or copy) files, use env variables on Win/Unix systems, generate log, call other scripts.
I use perl to write utilities that usually open a telnet session, send commands and parse the result.
To be able to understand and edit existing scripts
To use embedded Perl inside Verilog: Check log files for errors, warning, special words, generate expect data and check for comparison,count special words....
I would like to know how to write a script that gets a list of devices in the network, then login to each device to get its config, then search for a specific string (command) in the config and make changes to the config.
The main objective from this training is to know how to write effective scripts, for exexecuting script that goes over hundreds devices and performing actions like:
- changing fields
- looking for specific parameter from the config file
- looking for specific SNMP parameter
I wrote several scripts for our Application Manager upgrade. The scripts contains functionality such as parsing files, invoking SQL scripts and Java code etc.
Script that parses directory of xml files, and counts in each xml the occurrences of several parameters. The analysis results should be written in an excel sheet.
Script that monitors unix processes: runs in the crontab, and checks the current running processes: names, the period of time that they take, the cpu usage and memory usage and compares the results to baseline of running processes.
The objective is to write tools such as: parsing log file, debugging tools, custom tools that will help us analyze infrastructure problems.

Where are the Open source developers from?

2010-05-18T13:08:48+00:00

People often ask me how do people have time to write open source Perl code? If we look around we see that almost all the people in the Perl Community are from the wealthy countries. Countries where the GDP per capita is high.

My assumption is that there is a strong correllation between wealth and contribution to an open source project. I am not talking about the usage of Open Source applications, but the contribution to the code base or documentation or other parts of the applications. I am not even talking about wealthy people. Maybe middle-class? I am not sure.

I guess people who have have to work harder to maintain a reasonable standard of living will have less time to spend on activities that are not directly contributing to their income. So probably that's the reason you see a lot less contribution from Easter Europe than Western Europe and almost no contributionf from Africa. Except maybe South Africa.

I hope that upcoming Perl Survey will shed more light on this. At least within the Perl community.

I also tried to search for some data about this and found the Open Source Activity Map of Red Hat from 2008. Unfortunatelly the data is missing for most of Africa and a large part of Asia. That's what white means.

Looking at both the map and the Open Source Index Ranks there are a few countries that surprised me, especially Brazil and China but also India, Thailand and Malaysia. They are ahead of both Austria and Canada.

None of these countries have high GDP/capita but they are quite big so the overall GDP is high. Maybe that's the reason.

What do you think? What are the key reasons people in a certain country contribute or not to open source?

Fixing my editor

2010-05-16T21:56:47+00:00

In the "Window" menu of Padre I can see the list of open files and I can click on the name of a file to jump to that buffer. Unfortunatelly recently I noticed that it works incorrectly. At least once I close a file, clicking on a name takes me to the wrong buffer.

It's an annoying bug, especially if you have many files open. It is especially annoying as I recall we had a similar bug a while ago and I think it was fixed. So first thing I went to our bug tracking system and searched for "window menu". That brought 4 closed bugs but none of them was this bug. I tried a couple of other searches but nothing came up.

So I asked it on the Padre IRC channel but recently it has been a bit quiet there and it was Sunday evening GMT time so I have not received any reply.

Before filing a new bug, let's first try to analyze a bit more when does this happen.

Reconstructing the bug and reporting it

I close all the files, which means I also need to stop writing my blog for now, and then open them one by one and see if the menu works correctly. If it works well I'll try closing a file and see if the list is correct or even the list of files is corrupted and then check if the switching is correct.

Actually a little playing with the file opening and window switching revealed a much simpler case that does not even involve closing files. It seems to be a matter of ABC ordering. So I opened a ticket.

Searching for direction

How can I fix this bug? I could think of two strategies:

1) I can try to find the location of the code that refreshes the list in the "Window menu" and try to understand how does it work.

2) I can try to locate a revision of Padre in which this bug does not exist yet with the help of the bisect command of git. Indeed, even though Padre is in SVN, I am using the svn2git bridge.

As I could not find the earlier bug report I started to think that when I saw this bug a few months ago I might have not reported it which would mean this particular bug was around for many moons. That would mean trying to locate the revision that broke this might be very difficult. That might mean jumping through several versions of Padre that might be totally broken for various other reasons.

So even though I hardly touched the code for a while I decided to start looking at the code.

Looking at the source code

First I looked at Padre::Action::Window that contains the list of actions. Soon I understood that it only contains the static actions and not the dynamic menu options I am looking for.

So then I looked at Padre::Wx::Menu::Window where the actual menu is maintained.

Soon I located the refresh_windowlist method that updates the list of files in the Window menu.

What I noticed there is that the filenames are ordered for the display which is good and in the event callbacks we set the id of the corresponding window which would be also good if we did not mix them up.

Adding some debugging prints (of $nth and $order[$nth]) could easily show that we don't set the callback to hold the index of the correct editor window or buffer.

When refreshing the Window menu we don't recreate the whole menu as that was causing some flickering. Especially on slow machines. This means that we never update the ids of the first few entires and we might add the same numbers again in later callback.

Potential solutions

Once I know what is the problem I thought a couple of possible solutions:

Put the full file name in the Help entry that will also show up in the status bar and I can use it to locate the buffer holding that file. Except that we might have a number of new buffers that do not have a filename.
When refreshing the Window menu I could recreate the whole menu but I think we replaced that as that was causing some flickering.
When refreshing the Window menu I could update the window number in each call-back. Except that I have no idea how can I replace an event handler. If I recall we tried that once and arrived to the conclusion that you cannot do that in wxWidgets. Or at least not in the Perl binding. We might have missed something.
I could maintain a mapping from the menu items to real buffer numbers but that would be just a duplication of already existing information that can easily go out of sync.
I could put the menu number in the Help field and update it on every refresh though it is not that nice to have the id number in the status bar.
Then came the idea to fetch the label of the menu and then locate the buffer based on the name.

In order to implement this last idea I need to be able to fetch the current menu object from within the callback of the event. Checking the parameters of such callback I saw it receives two objects: A Padre::Wx::Main and a Wx::CommandEvent object. The latter should contain some clue regarding which menu option was clicked but looking at the documentation of Wx::CommandEvent and trying I think every Get method I have not found any way to get that object.

I asked the people on the WxPerl mailing list. I hope there will be some answer to this.

  134	
  135	        # Add menu entries if we have extra labels
  136	        foreach my $nth ( $previous + 1 .. $pages ) {
  137	                Wx::Event::EVT_MENU(
  138	                        $self->{main},
  139	                        $self->Append( -1, $label[ $order[$nth] ] ),
  140	                        sub {
  141	                                $_[0]->on_nth_pane( $order[$nth] );
  142	                        },
  143	                );
  144	        }

So as the callback is already a closure I could add the object of the currently created menu item to it and that would remain persistant. It required moving the creation of the menu object to a separate call, outside the event generation (line 135 from line 139). Within the event callback on line 141 I could use the $item and the also external $notebook object.

  134	        # Add menu entries if we have extra labels
  135*	        my $item = $self->Append( -1, $label[ $order[$nth] ] ); 	
  136	        foreach my $nth ( $previous + 1 .. $pages ) {
  137	                Wx::Event::EVT_MENU(
  138	                        $self->{main},
  139*	                        $item,
  140	                        sub {
  141*	                                my $id = $notebook->find_pane_by_label($item->GetText);
  142	                                $_[0]->on_nth_pane( $id );
  143	                        },
  144	                );
  145	        }

I also had to implement the new find_pane_by_label method of the Padre::Wx::Notebook class but that was quite straight forward.

  206	sub find_pane_by_label {
  207	        my $self  = shift;
  208	        my $label = shift;
  209	
  210	        my @labels = $self->labels;
  211	        my ($id) = grep {$label eq $labels[$_]} 0..$#labels;
  212	
  213	        return $id;
  214	}

The crash

It worked well. For some of the files. Not for some other files.

I was baffled.

Ate some chocolate.

Then I added debugging prints to the find_pane_by_label method to see what is in $label and what is in @labels. I was very surprised to see that in $label I have blog__0014.pod even though I put in blog_0014.pod

(Please, don't laugh. That's how I write my blog.)

It seems that the GetText method returns two underscores if there is one in the file. I have a file called blog_0014.pod. It is displayed correctly but GetText returns blog__0014.pod.

Scary.

I asked about this too on the wxperl mailing list but I did not want to wait for a reply so I went on to try somethig else.

I added the same text to the Help of each menu (so it will show up in the statusbar when the menu item is highlighted) and I used the GetHelp method within the event along with an appropriate comment.

  137	        # Add menu entries if we have extra labels
  138	        foreach my $nth ( $previous + 1 .. $pages ) {
  139	                my $item = $self->Append( -1, $label[ $order[$nth] ] );
  140*	                $item->SetHelp( $label[ $order[$nth] ] );
  141	                Wx::Event::EVT_MENU(
  142	                        $self->{main},
  143	                        $item,
  144	                        sub {
  145	                                # we need to use the Help here only as the Text seems to be
  146	                                # slightly corrupted: if filename has underscores
  147	                                # they will be doubled in the GetText
  148*	                                my $id = $notebook->find_pane_by_label($item->GetHelp);
  149*	                                return if not defined $id; # TODO warn if this happens!
  150*	                                $_[0]->on_nth_pane( $id );
  151	                        },
  152	                );
  153	        }

The full change fixed the issue.

We are left with 476 active tickets

Cleaning up

A few hours later on the wxPerl mailing list Mark Dootson pointed out that I probably need GetLabel rather than GetText. Indeed, the GetLabel call returns the, well, label of the menu item without control characters which means it works correctly for files with an underscore in their name.

That allowed me to eliminate the SetHelp calls.

  136	        # Add menu entries if we have extra labels
  137	        foreach my $nth ( $previous + 1 .. $pages ) {
  138	                my $item = $self->Append( -1, $label[ $order[$nth] ] );
  139	                Wx::Event::EVT_MENU(
  140	                        $self->{main},
  141	                        $item,
  142	                        sub {
  143*	                                my $id = $notebook->find_pane_by_label($item->GetLabel);
  144	                                return if not defined $id; # TODO warn if this happens!
  145	                                $_[0]->on_nth_pane( $id );
  146	                        },
  147	                );
  148	        }

The full version is in rev 11471

Deleted blog entry

2010-05-16T00:53:40+00:00

Oups. This was a partially written blog entry here. The real one is here: Where are the Open source developers from?

Update on some open issues

2010-05-15T23:41:15+00:00

Perl Jobs

The poll What are the most important features of an employer or a job opportunity for you? has ended. Results and raw data are available.

An update to the Business awareness of Perl developers blog:

I checked the size of the various groups again after 2 weeks:

 .NET       37,586 => 38,560 (growth: 974   2.5%)
 Java       33,080 => 33,984 (growth: 904   2.7%)
 PHP        16,609 => 16,890 (growth: 281   1.7%)
 Python      9,538 =>  9,690 (growth: 152   1.5%)
 Javascript  8,506 =>  8,664 (growth: 158   1.8%)
 Ruby        8,412 =>  8,602 (growth: 190   2.2%)
 Perl        3,891 =>  4,050 (growth: 159   4.0%)

I can imagine a title: The growth rate of Perl Mongers is double that of PHP, Python and Ruby combined! (4.0% compared to 1.8%) after all that's all just statistics.... but some people would think this is important.

Well, it is, so this is the link to sign up to the Perl Mongers group on LinkedIN.

Vistor count

In Falling number of visitors? I quoted a few numbers about visitors count. Since then I have been blogging every day and got an average of 300 visitors every day. Now I only need to increase the interest level of my blogs.

Really I should ask you! What would you like to read about?

Apache Software Foundation

2010-05-15T23:12:57+00:00

While the Apache project is a diverse and exciting project the Apache Software Foundation does not seems to be very exciting. It has a healthy budget and a number of contributors. It is just working.

Membership

The members of the foundation are people who are involved in one the projects of the Apache Foundation. They are nominated and then accepted (or not) by the existing members. Currently there are about 260 members.

Management

The Board of Directors consists of 9 people. They are elected by the members annually. There are also a lot of officers. Each Apache based project has a VP and there are more VPs for various general subjects.

Finances and Funding

The sponsorship page tells us that the levels of sponsorships range from 5K USD (Bronze) to 100K USD (Platinum). On the thank you page where the sponsors are listed we find 3 Platinum sponsors (100K), 2 Gold sponsors (40K), 2 Silver sponsor (20K), and 6 Bronze sponsors (5K).

That adds up to 470K for a year as revenue from the sponsors.

In 2009 the Apache Foundation reported 317K USD revenue.

I am not sure what is the source of the difference between these two numbers but that might be due to some of the sponsors on that page joining only in the midle of 2009 or in 2010.

They also reported 236K USD expenses and were left with 343K USD assets at the end of the year. The expenses were devided more or less equally between Infrastructure services (hosting, version control, bug tracking, etc) on one hand and Marketing and PR on the other.

Reporting

The financial reports are a bit out of date on the public records page and I have not seen a budget or some details on how the money was spent.

There is also the ASF blog with a post every week or two.